Altered Carbon (27 page)

“RD?”

“Yeah,
RD’d.” Jerry looked momentarily nonplussed, as if I’d just queried
the colour of the sky.

“I’m
not from here,” I said patiently.

“RD.
Real Death. He pulped them, man. Couple of other guys went down stack intact so
Ryker paid off some Dipper to register the lot of them Catholic. Either the
input didn’t take, or someone at OrgDam found out. He got the double
barrel. Two hundred years, no remission. Word is, Ortega headed up the squad
that took him down.”

Well,
well
. I waved the Nemex
encouragingly.

“That’s
it, man. All I got. It’s off the wire. Street talk. Look, Ryker never
shook this place down, even back when he worked ST. I run a clean house. I
never even met the guy.”

“And
Oktai?”

Jerry
nodded vigorously. “That’s it, Oktai. Oktai used to run spare part
deals out of Oakland. You, I mean, Ryker used to shake him down all the time.
Beat him half to death couple of years back.”

“So
Oktai comes running to you—”

“That’s
it. He’s like, crazy, saying Ryker must be working some scam down here.
So we run the cabin tapes, get you talking to—”

Jerry dried
up as he saw where we were heading. I gestured again with the gun.

“That’s
fucking it.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice.

“All
right.” I sat back a little and patted my pockets for cigarettes,
remembered I had none. “You smoke?”

“Smoke?
Do I look like a fucking idiot?”

I sighed.
“Never mind. What about Trepp? She looked a little upmarket for your
cred. Who’d you borrow her from?”

“Trepp’s
an indie. Contract hire for whoever. She does me favours sometimes.”

“Not
any more. You ever see her real sleeve?”

“No.
Wire says she keeps it on ice in New York most of the time.”

“That
far from here?”

“
‘Bout an hour, suborbital.”

By my
reckoning that put her in the same league as Kadmin. Global muscle, maybe
Interplanetary too. The Senior Fleet.

‘So
who’s the wire say she’s working for now?”

“I
don’t know.”

I studied
the barrel of the blaster as if it were a Martian relic. “Yeah, you
do.” I looked up and offered him a bleak smile. “Trepp’s
gone. Unstacked, the works. You don’t need to worry about selling her
out. You need to worry about me.”

He stared
defiantly at me for a couple of moments, then looked down.

“I
heard she was doing stuff for the Houses.”

“Good.
Now, tell me about the clinic. Your sophisticated friends.”

The Envoy
training should have been keeping my voice even, but maybe I was getting rusty
because Jerry heard something there. He moistened his lips.

“Listen,
those are dangerous people. You got away, you’d better just leave it at
that. You got no idea what they—”

“I’ve
got a pretty good idea, actually.” I pointed the blaster into his face.
“The clinic.”

“Christ,
they’re just people I know. You know, business associates. They can use
the spare parts, sometimes, and I—” He changed tack abruptly as he
saw my face. “They do stuff for me sometimes. It’s just business.”

I thought
of Louise, alias Anenome, and the journey we’d taken together. I felt a
muscle beneath my eye twitch, and it was all I could do not to pull the trigger
there and then. I dug up my voice, instead, and used it. It sounded more like a
machine than the door robot had.

“We’re
going for a ride, Jerry. Just you and me, to visit your business associates.
And don’t fuck with me. I’ve already figured out it’s over
the other side of the Bay. And I’ve got a good memory for places. You
steer me wrong, and I’ll RD you on the spot. Got it?”

From his
face I judged that he did.

But just to
make sure, on the way out of the club I stopped beside each corpse and burnt
its head off down to the shoulders. The burning left an acrid stench that
followed us out of the gloom and into the early morning street like a ghost of
rage.

There’s
a village up on the north arm of the Millsport archipelago where, if a
fisherman survives drowning, he is required to swim out to a low reef about
half a kilometre from shore, spit into the ocean beyond and return.
Sarah’s from there, and once, holed up in a cheap swamp hotel, hiding
from heat both physical and figurative, she tried to explain the rationale. It
always sounded like macho bullshit to me.

Now,
marching down the sterile white corridors of the clinic once again, with the
muzzle of my own Philips gun screwed into my neck, I began to have some
understanding of the strength it must take to wade back into that water.
I’d had cold shivers since we went down in the lift: for the second time,
Jerry holding the gun on me from behind. After Innenin, I’d more or less
forgotten what it was like to be genuinely afraid, but virtualities were a
notable exception. There, you had no control, and literally anything could
happen.

Again and
again.

They were
rattled at the clinic. The news of Trepp’s barbecue ride must have
reached them by now, and the face that Jerry had spoken to on the screen at the
discreetly appointed front door had gone death white at the sight of me.

“We
thought—”

“Never
mind that,” snapped Jerry. “Open the fucking door. We’ve got
to get this piece of shit off the street.”

The clinic
was part of an old turn-of-the-millennium block that someone had renovated in
neo-industrial style, doors painted with heavy black and yellow chevrons,
façades draped in scaffolding and balconies hung with fake cabling and
hoists. The door before us divided along the upward points of the chevrons and
slid noiselessly apart. With a last glance at the early morning street, Jerry
thrust me inside.

The entrance
hall was also neoind, more scaffolding along the walls and patches of exposed
brickwork. A pair of security guards were waiting at the end. One of them put
out a hand as we approached, and Jerry swung on him, snarling.

“I
don’t need any fucking help. You’re the wipeouts that let this
motherfucker go in the first place.”

The two
guards exchanged a glance and the extended grasp turned into a placatory
gesture. They conveyed us to an elevator door that proved to be the same
commercial-capacity shaft I’d ridden down from the car park on the roof
last time. When we came out at the bottom, the same medical team were waiting,
sedating implements poised. They looked edgy, tired. Butt end of the night
shift. When the same nurse moved to hypo me, Jerry brought out the snarl again.
He had it down to perfection.

“Never
fucking mind that.” He screwed the Philips gun harder into my neck.
“He isn’t going anywhere. I want to see Miller.”

“He’s
in surgery.”

“Surgery?”
Jerry barked a laugh. “You mean he’s watching the machine make pick
and mix. All right, Chung, then.”

The team
hesitated.

“What?
Don’t tell me you got all your consultants working for a living this
morning.”

“No,
it’s…” The man nearest me gestured. ”It’s not
procedure, taking him in awake.”

“Don’t
fucking tell me about procedure.” Jerry did a good impression of a man
about to explode with fury. “Was it procedure to let this piece of shit
get out and wreck my place after I sent him over here? Was that fucking
procedure?
Was it
?”

There was
silence. I looked at the blaster and Nemex, shoved into Jerry’s
waistband, and measured the angles. Jerry took a renewed grip on my collar and
ground the gun under my jaw once again. He glared at the medics and spoke with
a kind of gritted calm.

“He
ain’t moving. Got it? There isn’t time for this bullshit. We are
going to see Chung. Now,
move
.”

They bought
it. Anyone would have. You pile on the pressure, and most people fall back on
response. They give in to the higher authority, or the man with the gun. These
people were tired and scared. We double-timed it down the corridors. Past the
operating theatre I had woken up in, or one like it. I caught a glimpse of
figures gathered around the surgery platform, the autosurgeon moving spiderlike
above them. We were a dozen paces further along when someone stepped into the
corridor behind us.

“Just
a moment.” The voice was cultured, almost leisurely, but it brought the
medics and Jerry up short. We turned to face a tall, blue-smocked figure
wearing bloodstained spray-on surgical gloves and a mask which he now unpinned
with one fastidious thumb and forefinger. The visage beneath was blandly
handsome, blue eyes in a tanned, square-jawed face, this year’s Competent
Male, courtesy of some upmarket cosmetic salon.

“Miller,”
said Jerry.

“What
exactly is going on here? Courault,” the tall man turned to the female
medic, “you know better than to bring subjects through here
unsedated.”

“Yes,
sir. Mr.Sedaka insisted that there was no risk involved. He said he was in a
hurry. To see director Chung.”

“I
don’t care how much of a hurry he’s in.” Miller swung on Jerry,
eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Are you insane, Sedaka? What do you think
this is, the visitors’ gallery? I’ve got clients in there.
Recognisable faces. Courault, sedate this man immediately.”

Oh,
well. No one’s lucky for ever
.

I was
already moving. Before Courault could lift the hypospray from her hip sack, I
yanked both the Nemex and the blaster from Jerry’s waistband and spun,
firing. Courault and her two colleagues went down, multiply injured. Blood
splattered on antiseptic white behind them. Miller had time for one outraged
yell and then I shot him in the mouth with the Nemex. Jerry was just backing
away from me, the unloaded Philips gun still dangling from his hand. I threw up
the blaster.

“Look,
I did my fucking best, I—”

The beam
cut loose and his head exploded.

In the
sudden quiet that followed, I retraced my steps to the doors of the surgery and
pushed through them. The little knot of figures, immaculately suited to a man
and woman, had left the table on which a young female sleeve was laid out, and
were gaping at me behind forgotten surgical masks. Only the autosurgeon
continued working unperturbed, making smooth incisions and cauterising wounds
with abrupt little sizzlings. Indistinct lumps of raw red poked out of an array
of small metal dishes collected at the subject’s head. It looked
unnervingly like the start of some arcane banquet.

The woman
on the table was Louise.

There were
five men and women in the theatre, and I killed them all while they stared at
me. Then I shot the autosurgeon to pieces with the blaster, and raked the beam
over the rest of the equipment in the room. Alarms sirened into life from every
wall. In the storm of their combined shrieking, I went round and inflicted Real
Death on everyone there.

Outside,
there were more alarms and two of the medical crew were still alive. Courault
had succeeded in crawling a dozen metres down the corridor in a broad trail of
her own blood, and one of her male colleagues, too weak to escape, was trying
to prop himself up against the wall. The floor was slippery under him and he
kept sliding back down. I ignored him and went after the woman. She stopped
when she heard my footsteps, twisted her head to look round and then began to
crawl again, frantically. I stamped a foot down between her shoulders to make
her stop and then kicked her onto her back.

We looked
at each other for a long moment while I remembered her impassive face as she
had put me under the night before. I lifted the blaster for her to see.

“Real
Death,” I said, and pulled the trigger.

I walked
back to the remaining medic who had seen and was now scrabbling desperately
backwards away from me. I crouched down in front of him. The screaming of the
alarms rose and fell over our heads like lost souls.

“Jesus
Christ,” he moaned as I pointed the blaster at his face. “Jesus
Christ, I only
work
here.”

“Good
enough,” I told him.

The blaster
was almost inaudible against the alarms.

Working
rapidly, I took care of the third medic in similar fashion, dealt with Miller a
little more at length, stripped Jerry’s headless corpse of its jacket and
tacked the garment under my arm. Then I scooped up the Philips gun, tacked it
into my waistband and left. On my way out along the screaming corridors of the
clinic, I killed every person that I met, and melted their stacks to slag.

Personal
.

The police were landing on
the roof as I let myself out of the front door and walked unhurriedly down the
street. Under my arm, Miller’s severed head was beginning to seep blood
through the lining of Jerry’s jacket.