Altered Carbon (25 page)

The blaster
came out of its sheath with a soft strop, and was under my chin. I barely saw
it happen. My recently re-sleeved senses scrabbled for a reaction, aeons too
late. The synthetic woman leaned close to the side of my face.

“Don’t
you ever threaten me, you piece of shit,” she said softly. “You got
these clowns scared, they’re anchored in place and they think
you’re carrying the weight to sink them. That doesn’t work with me.
Got it?”

I looked at
her out of the corner of my eye, the best I could manage with my head jammed up
by the gun.

“Got
it,” I said.

“Good,”
she breathed, and removed the blaster. “You check out with Ray,
I’ll line up and apologise with everybody else. But until then
you’re just another potential wipeout gibbering for your stack.”

At a rapid
pace, we went down corridors that I tried to memorise and into a lift identical
to the one that had delivered me to the clinic. I counted the floors off again,
and when we stepped out into the parking area my eyes jerked involuntarily to
the door that they had taken Louise through. My recollections of time during
the torture were hazy—the Envoy conditioning was deliberately curtaining
off the experience to avert the trauma—but even if it had gone on a
couple of days, that was about ten minutes real time. I’d probably only
been in the clinic an hour or two maximum, and Louise’s body might still
be waiting for the knife behind that door, her mind still stacked.

“Get
in the car,” said the woman laconically.

This time
my ride was a larger, more elegant machine, reminiscent of Bancroft’s
limousine. There was already a driver in the forward cabin, liveried and
shaven-headed with the bar code of his employer printed above his left ear.
I’d seen quite a few of these on the streets of Bay City, and wondered
why anyone would submit to it. On Harlan’s World no one outside the
military would be seen dead with authorisation stripes. It was too close to the
serfdom of the Settlement years for comfort.

A second
man stood by the rear cabin door, an ugly-looking machine pistol dangling
negligently from his hand. He too had the shaven skull and the bar code. I
looked hard at it as I passed him and got into the rear cabin. The synthetic
woman leaned down to talk to the chauffeur and I cranked up the neurachem to
eavesdrop.

“…head
in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.”

“No
problem. Coastal’s running light tonight and—”

One of the
medics slammed the door shut on me and the solid clunk at max amplification
nearly blew my eardrums. I sat in silence, recovering, until the woman and the
machine pistoleer opened the doors on the other side and climbed in next to me.

“Close
your eyes,” the woman said, producing my bandanna. “I’m going
blindfold you for a few minutes. If we do let you go, these guys aren’t
going to want you knowing where to find them.”

I looked
around at the windows. “These look polarised to me anyway.”

“Yeah,
but no telling how good that neurachem is, huh? Now hold still.”

She knotted
the red cloth with practised efficiency and spread it a little to cover my
whole field of vision. I settled back in the seat.

“Couple
of minutes. You just sit quiet and no peeking. I’ll tell you when.”

The car
boosted up and presumably out because I heard the drumming of rain against the
bodywork. There was a faint smell of leather from the upholstery, which beat
the odour of faeces on the inbound journey, and the seat I was in moulded
itself supportively to my form. I seemed to have moved up in the order of
things.

Strictly
temporary, man
. I smiled faintly as
Jimmy’s voice echoed in the back of my skull. He was right. A couple of
things were clear about whoever we were going to see. This was someone who
didn’t want to come to the clinic, who didn’t even want to be seen near
it. That bespoke respectability, and with it power, the power to access
off-world data. Pretty soon they were going to know that the Envoy Corps was an
empty threat, and very shortly after that I was going to be dead. Really dead.

That
kind of dictates the action, pal
.

Thanks,
Jimmy
.

After a few
minutes the woman told me to take off the blindfold. I pushed it up onto my
forehead and retied it there in its customary position. At my side, the muscle
with the machine pistol smirked. I gave him a curious look.

“Something
funny?”

“Yeah.”
The woman spoke without turning her gaze from the city lights beyond the
window. “You look like a fucking idiot.”

“Not
where I come from.”

She turned
to look at me pityingly. “You aren’t where you come from.
You’re on Earth. Try behaving like it.”

I looked
from one to the other of them, the pistoleer still smirking, the synthetic with
the expression of polite contempt, then shrugged and reached up with both hands
to untie the bandanna. The woman went back to watching the lights of the city
sink below us. The rain seemed to have stopped.

I chopped
down savagely from head height, left and right. My left fist jarred into the
pistoleer’s temple with enough force to break the bone and he slumped
sideways with a single grunt. He never even saw the blow coming. My right arm
was still in motion.

The
synthetic whipped around, probably faster than I could have struck, but she
misread me. Her arm was raised to block and cover her head, and I was under the
guard, reaching. My hand closed on the blaster at her belt, knocked out the
safety and triggered it. The beam seethed into life, cutting downwards, and a
large quantity of the woman’s right leg burst open in wet ropes of flesh
before the blowback circuits cut the blast. She howled, a cry more of rage than
of pain, and then I dragged the muzzle of the weapon up, triggering another
blast diagonally across her body. The blaster carved a channel a handsbreadth
wide right through her and into the seat behind. Blood exploded across the
cabin.

The blaster
cut out again and the cabin went suddenly dim as the flaring of the beam weapon
stopped. Beside me, the synthetic woman bubbled and sighed, and then the
section of her torso that the head was attached to sagged away from the left
side of the body. Her forehead came to rest against the window she had been
looking out of. It looked oddly as if she was cooling her brow on the rain
streaked glass. The rest of the body sat stiffly upright, the massive sloping
wound cauterised clean by the beam. The mingled stink of cooked meat and fried
synthetic components was everywhere.

“Trepp?
Trepp
?” It was the chauffeur’s intercom squawking. I wiped
blood out of my eyes and looked at the screen set in the forward bulkhead.

“She’s
dead,” I told the shocked face, and held up the blaster.
“They’re both dead. And you’re next, if you don’t get
us on the ground right now.”

The
chauffeur rallied. “We’re five hundred metres above the Bay,
friend, and I’m flying this car. What do you propose doing about
that?”

I selected
a mid-point on the wall between the two cabins, knocked out the blowback cutout
on the blaster and shielded my face with one hand.

“Hey,
what are you—”

I fired
through into the driver’s compartment on tight focus. The beam punched a
molten hole about a centimetre wide and for a moment it rained sparks backwards
into the cabin as the armouring beneath the plastic resisted. Then the sparks
died as the beam broke through and I heard something electrical short out in
the forward compartment. I stopped firing.

“The
next one goes right through your seat,” I promised. “I’ve got
friends who’ll re-sleeve me when they fish us out of the Bay.
You’ll carve into steaks right through this fucking wall, and even if I
miss your stack, they’ll have a hard time finding which part of you it’s
inside, now fucking
get me on the ground
.”

The
limousine banked abruptly to one side, losing altitude. I sat back a little
amidst the carnage and cleaned more blood off my face with one sleeve.

“That’s
good,” I said more calmly. “Now set me down near Mission Street.
And if you’re thinking about signalling for help, think about this. If
there’s a firefight, you die first. Got it? You die first. I’m
talking about real death. I’ll make sure I burn out your stack if
it’s the last thing I do before they take me down.”

His face
looked back at me on the screen, pale. Scared, but not scared enough. Or maybe
scared of someone else. Anyone who bar-codes their employees isn’t likely
to be the forgiving type, and the reflex of longheld obedience through
hierarchy is usually enough to overcome fear of a combat death. That’s
how you fight wars, after all—with soldiers who are more afraid of
stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.

I used to
be like that myself.

“How
about this?” I offered rapidly. “You violate traffic protocol
putting us down. The Sia turn up, bust you and hold you. You say nothing.
I’m gone and they’ve got nothing on you outside of a traffic
misdemeanour. Your story is you’re just the driver, your passengers had a
little disagreement in the back seat and then I hijacked you to the ground.
Meanwhile, whoever you work for bails you out rapido and you pick up a bonus
for not cracking in virtual holding.”

I watched
the screen. His expression wavered, and he swallowed hard. Enough carrot, time
for the stick. I locked the blowback circuit on again, lifted the blaster so he
could see it and fitted it to the nape of Trepp’s neck.

“I’d
say you’re getting a bargain.”

At
point-blank range, the blaster beam vaporised spine, stack and everything
around it. I turned back to the screen.

“Your
call.”

The
driver’s face convulsed, and the limo started to lose height raggedly. I
watched the flow of traffic through the window, then leaned forward and tapped
on the screen.

“Don’t
forget that violation, will you?”

He gulped
and nodded. The limo dropped vertically through stacked lanes of traffic and
bumped hard along the ground, to a chorus of furious collision alert screeches
from the vehicles around us. Through the window I recognised the street I’d
cruised with Curtis the night before. Our pace slowed somewhat.

“Crack
the nearside door,” I said, tucking the blaster under my jacket. Another
jerky nod and the door in question clunked open, then hung ajar. I swivelled,
kicked it wide and heard police sirens wailing somewhere above us. My eyes met
the driver’s on the screen for a moment and I grinned.

“Wise
man,” I said, and threw myself out of the coasting vehicle.

The
pavement hit me in the shoulder and back as I rolled amidst startled cries from
passing pedestrians. I rolled twice, hit hard against a stone frontage and
climbed cautiously to my feet. A passing couple stared at me and I skinned my
teeth in a smile that made them hurry on, finding interest in other shop
fronts.

A stale
blast of displaced air washed over me as a traffic cop’s cruiser dropped
in the wake of the offending limo. I stayed where I was, giving back the
diminishing handful of curious looks from passers-by who had seen my unorthodox
arrival. Interest in me was waning, in any case. One by one the stares slipped
away, drawn by the flashing lights of the police cruiser, now hovering
menacingly above and behind the stationary limo.

“Turn
off your engines and remain where you are,” crackled the airborne speaker
system.

A crowd
started to knot up as people hurried past me, jostling and trying to see what
was going on. I leaned back on the frontage, checking myself for damage from
the jump. By the feel of the fading numbness in my shoulder and across my back,
I’d done it right this time.

“Raise
your hands above your head and step away from your vehicle,” came the
metallic voice of the traffic cop.

Over the
bobbing heads of the spectators, I made out the driver, easing himself out of
the limo in the recommended posture. He looked relieved to be alive. For a
moment I caught myself wondering why that kind of stand-off wasn’t more
popular in the circles I moved in.

Just too
many death wishes all round, I guess.

I backstepped a few metres
in the mix of the crowd, then turned and slipped away into the brightly lit
anonymity of the Bay City night.

The
personal, as every one’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if
some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm
you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of
Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs,
hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the
creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want
justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much
damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way you stand a far better
chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And
make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous
marks the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and
little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate.
And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture
and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business,
it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life
and that IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL, mil, fuck them. Make it personal
.”