Altered Carbon (26 page)

QUELLCRIST
FALCONER

Things
I Should Have Learnt by Now

Volume II

There was a cold blue dawn over the city
by the time I got back to Licktown, and everything had the wet gunmetal sheen
of recent rain. I stood in the shadow of the express-way pillars and watched
the gutted street for any hint of movement. There was a feeling I needed, but
it wasn’t easy to come by in the cold light of the rising day. My head
was buzzing with rapid data assimilation and Jimmy de Soto floated around in
the back of my mind like a restless demon familiar.

Where
are you going, Tak
?

To do
some damage
.

The Hendrix
hadn’t been able to give me anything on the clinic I’d been taken
to. From Deek’s promise to the Mongolian to bring a disc of my torture
right back across, I supposed that the place had to be on the other side of the
Bay, probably in Oakland, but that in itself wasn’t much help, even for
an AI. The whole Bay area appeared to be suffused with illegal biotech
activity. I was going to have to retrace my steps the hard way.

Jerry’s
Closed Quarters.

Here the
Hendrix had been more helpful. After a brief skirmish with some low-grade
counter-intrusion systems, it laid out the biocabin club’s entrails for
me on the screen in my room. Floor plan, security staffing, timetables and
shifts. I slammed through it in seconds, fuelled by the latent rage from my
interrogation. With the sky beginning to pale in the window behind me, I fitted
the Nemex and the Philips gun in their holsters, strapped on the Tebbit knife,
and went out to do some interrogating of my own.

I’d
seen no sign of my tail when I let myself into the hotel, and he didn’t
seem to be around when I left either. Lucky for him, I guess.

Jerry’s
Closed Quarters by dawn light.

What little
cheap erotic mystique had clung to the place by night was gone now. The neon
and holosigns were bleached out, pinned on the building like a garish brooch on
an old gown. I looked bleakly at the dancing girl, still trapped in the
cocktail glass, and thought of Louise, alias Anenome, tortured to a death her
religion would not let her come back from.

Make it
personal
.

The Nemex
was in my right hand like a decision taken. As I walked towards the club, I
worked the slide action on it and the metallic snap was loud in the quiet
morning air. A slow, cold fury was beginning to fill me up now.

The door
robot stirred as I approached and its arms came up in a warding-off gesture.

“We’re
closed, friend,” the synth voice said.

I levelled
the Nemex at the lintel and shot out the robot’s brain dome. The casing
might have stopped smaller calibre shells, but the Nemex slugs smashed the unit
to pieces. Sparks fireworked abruptly and the synth voice shrieked. The
concertina octopus arms thrashed spastically, then went slack. Smoke curled
from the shattered lintel housing.

Cautiously,
I prodded one dangling tentacle aside with the Nemex, stepped through and met
Milo coming upstairs to find out what the noise was about. His eyes widened as
he saw me.

“You.
What—”

I shot him
through the throat, watched him flap and tumble down the steps and then, as he
struggled to get back on his feet, shot him again in the face. As I went down
the stairs after Milo a second heavy appeared in the dimly lit space below me,
took one shocked look at Milo’s corpse and went for a clumsy-looking
blaster at his belt. I nailed him twice through the chest before his ringers
touched the weapon.

At the
bottom of the stairs I paused, unholstered the Philips gun left-handed and
stood in silence for a moment, letting the echoes of the gunfire die away in my
ears. The heavy artillery rhythm that I’d come to expect of Jerry’s
was still playing but the Nemex had a loud voice. On my left was the pulsing
red glow of the corridor that led to the cabins, on the right a spider-web holo
with a variety of pipes and bottles trapped in it and the word BAR illuminumed
onto flat black doors beyond. The data in my head said a minimal security
presence for the cabins—three at most, more likely down to two at this
time of the morning. Milo and the nameless heavy on the stairs down, leaving
one more possible. The bar was soundproofed off, wired into a separate sound
system and running between two and four armed guards who doubled as bar staff.

Jerry the
cheapskate.

I listened,
cranking up the neurachem. From the corridor that led left I heard one of the
cabin doors open stealthily and then the soft scrape of someone sliding their
feet along the ground in the mistaken belief that it would make less noise than
walking. Keeping my eyes fixed on the bar doors to my right, I stuck the
Philips gun round the corner to the left and, without bothering to look, sewed
a silent scribble of bullets across the red lit air in the corridor. The weapon
seemed to sigh them out like branches blowing in a breeze. There was a
strangled grunt, and then the thud and clatter of a body and weapon hitting the
floor.

The doors
to the bar remained closed.

I eased my
head round the angle of the wall and in the stripes of red thrown by the
rotating lights saw a stocky-looking woman in combat fatigues clutching at her
side with one arm and clawing after a fallen handgun with the other. I stepped
quickly across to the weapon and kicked it well out of her reach, then knelt beside
her. I must have scored multiple hits; there was blood on her legs and her
shirt was drenched in it. I laid the muzzle of the Philips gun against her
forehead.

“You
work security for Jerry?”

She nodded,
eyes flaring white around her irises.

“One
chance. Where is he?”

“Bar,”
she hissed through her teeth, fighting back the pain. “Table. Back
corner.”

I nodded,
stood up and sighted carefully between her eyes.

“Wait,
you—”

The Philips
gun sighed.

Damage
.

I was in
the midst of the spiderweb holo, reaching for the bar doors, when they swung
open and I found myself face to face with Deek. He had even less time to react
to the phantom before him than Milo had. I tipped him the tiniest of formal
bows, barely an inclination of my head, and then let go of the fury inside me
and shot him repeatedly at waist height with both Nemex and Philips gun. He
staggered back through the doors under the multiple impacts and I followed him
in, still firing.

It was a
wide space, dimly lit by angled spots and the subdued orange guide lights of
the dancers’ runway, now abandoned. Along one wall, cool blue light shone
up from behind the bar, as if it was fronting an obscure downward staircase to
paradise. Behind was racked with the pipes, jack-ins and bottles on offer. The keeper
of this angel’s hoard took one look at Deck, reeling backwards with his
hands sunk in his ruined guts, and went for the holdout below the bar at a
speed that was truly semi-divine.

I heard the
dropped glass shatter, threw out the Nemex and hammered him back against the
displayed wares on the wall like an impromptu crucifixion. He hung there a
moment, curiously elegant, then turned and clawed down a racket of bottles and
pipes on his way to the floor. Deek went down too, still moving, and a dim,
bulky-looking form leaned against the edge of the runway leapt forward,
clearing a handgun from the waist. I left the Nemex focused on the bar—no
time to turn and aim—and snapped off a shot from the Philips gun,
half-raised. The figure grunted and staggered, losing his weapon and slumping
against the runway. My left arm raised, straightened and the head shot punched
him back onto the dance platform.

The Nemex
echoes were still dying in the corners of the room.

By now I
had sight of Jerry. He was ten metres away, surging to his feet behind a flimsy
table when I levelled the Nemex. He froze.

“Wise
man.” The neurachem was singing like wires, and there was an adrenalin
grin hanging crazily off my face. My mind rattled through the count. One shell
left in the Philips gun, six in the Nemex. “Leave your hands right there,
and sit the rest of you down. You twitch a finger and I’ll take it off at
the wrist.”

He sank
back into his seat, face working. Peripheral scan told me there was no one else
moving in the room. I stepped carefully over Deek, who had rolled into a foetal
ball around the damage in his gut and was giving out a deep, agonised wailing.
Keeping the Nemex focused on the table in front of Jerry’s groin, I
dropped my other arm until the Philips gun was pointing straight down and
pulled the trigger. The noise from Deek stopped.

At this,
Jerry erupted.

“Are
you fucking
crazy
, Ryker? Stop it! You can’t—”

I jerked
the Nemex barrel at him and either that or something in my face shut him up.
Nothing stirred behind the curtains at the end of the runway, nothing behind
the bar. The doors stayed closed. Crossing the remaining distance to
Jerry’s table, I kicked one of the chairs around backwards and then
straddled it, facing him.

“You,
Jerry,” I said evenly, “need to listen to people occasionally.
I’ve told you, my name is not Ryker.”

“Whoever
the fuck you are, I’m connected.” There was so much venom on the
face before me it was a wonder Jerry didn’t choke on it. “I’m
jacked into the fucking machine, you get me? This. All this. You’re going
to fucking pay. You’re going to wish—”

“I’d
never met you,” I finished for him. I stowed the empty Philips gun back
in its Fibregrip holster. “Jerry, I already wish I’d never met you.
Your sophisticated friends were sophisticated enough for that. But I notice
they didn’t tell you I was back on the street. Not so tight with Ray
these days, is that it?”

I was
watching his face, and the name didn’t register. Either he was very cool
under fire, or he genuinely wasn’t fishing in the senior fleet. I tried
again.

“Trepp’s
dead,” I said casually. His eyes moved, just a fraction. “Trepp,
and a few others. Want to know why you’re still alive?”

His mouth
tightened, but he said nothing. I leaned over the table and pushed the barrel
of the Nemex up against his left eye.

“I
asked you a question.”

“Fuck
you.”

I nodded
and settled back onto my seat. “Hard man, huh? So I’ll tell you. I
need some answers, Jerry. You can start by telling me what happened to
Elizabeth Elliott. That should be easy, I figure you carved her up yourself.
Then I want to know who Elias Ryker is, who Trepp works for, and where the
clinic is that you sent me to.”

“Fuck
you.”

“You
don’t think I’m serious? Or are you just hoping the cops are going
to show up and save your stack?” I fished the commandeered blaster out of
my pocket left-handed and drew a careful bead on the dead security guard on the
runway. The range was short and the beam torched his head off in a single
explosion. The stench of charred flesh rolled across the room to us. Keeping
one eye on Jerry, I played the beam around a little until I was sure I’d
destroyed everything from the shoulders up, then snapped the weapon off and
lowered it. Jerry stared at me over the table.

“You
piece of shit, he only
worked security for me
!”

“That’s
just become a proscribed profession, as far as I’m concerned. Deek and
the rest are going the same way. And so are you, unless you tell me what I want
to know.” I lifted the beam weapon. ”One chance.”

“
All
right
.” The crack was audible in his voice. “All right, all
right. Elliott tried to put a lock on a customer, she got some big name Meth
come slumming down here, reckoned she’d got enough shit to twist him.
Stupid cunt tried to make me a partnership deal, she figured I could lean on
this Meth guy. No fucking clue what she was dealing with.”

“No.”
I looked stonily at him across the table. “I guess not.”

He caught
the look. “Hey, man, I know what you’re thinking, but it
ain’t like that. I tried to warn her off, so she went direct. Direct to a
fucking Meth. You think I wanted this place ripped down and me buried under it.
I had to deal with her, man. Had to.”

“You
iced her?”

He shook
his head. “I made a call,” he said in a subdued voice.
“That’s how it works around here.”

“Who’s
Ryker?”

“Ryker’s
a—,” he swallowed. “—a cop. Used to work Sleeve Theft,
then they upped him to the Organic Damage Division. He was fucking that Sia
cunt, the one came out here the night you crocked Oktai.”

“Ortega?”

“Yeah,
Ortega. Everybody knew it, they say that’s how he got the transfer.
That’s why we figured you were—he was—back on the street.
When Deck saw you talking to Ortega we figured she’d accessed someone, done
a deal.”

“Back
on the street? Back from where?”

“Ryker
was dirty, man.” Now the flow had started, it was coming in full flood.
“He RD’d a couple of sleevedealers, up in Seattle—”