Altered Carbon (43 page)

“Trepp?”

“Good
guess. You going to let me sit down?”

I waved the
Philips gun at the seat opposite, where Sullivan was cupping both hands to his
eye. “If you can persuade your associate here to move over. Just keep
your hands above the table.”

The woman
smiled and inclined her head. She glanced at Sullivan, who was already
squeezing up to the wall to make space for her, and then, keeping her hands
poised at her sides, she swung herself elegantly in beside him. The economy of
motion was so tight that her pendant earring barely shifted. Once seated, she
pressed both hands palm down on the table in front of her.

“That
make you feel safer?”

“It’ll
do,” I said, noticing that the black glass rings, like the earring, were
a body joke. Each ring showed, X-ray like, a ghostly blue section of the bones
in the fingers beneath. Trepp’s style, at least, I could get to like.

“I
didn’t tell him anything,” Sullivan blurted.

“You
didn’t know anything worth a jack,” said Trepp disinterestedly. She
hadn’t even turned to look at him. “Lucky for you I turned up,
I’d say. Mr.Kovacs doesn’t look like someone ready to take
‘don’t know’ for an answer. Am I right?”

“What
do you want, Trepp?”

“Come
to help out.” Trepp glanced up as something rattled in the restaurant.
The waiter had arrived bearing a tray with a large teapot and two handleless
cups. “You order this?”

“Yeah.
Help yourself.”

“Thanks,
I love this stuff.” Trepp waited while the waiter deposited everything,
then busied herself with the teapot. “Sullivan, you want a cup too? Hey,
bring him another cup, would you. Thanks. Now, where was I?”

“You’d
come to help out,” I said pointedly.

“Yeah.”
Trepp sipped at the green tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup.
“That’s right. I’m here to clarify things. See, you’re
trying to hammer the information out of Sullivan here. And he doesn’t
know fuck all. His contact was me, so here I am. Talk to me.”

I looked at
her levelly. “I killed you last week, Trepp.”

“Yeah,
so they tell me.” Trepp set down the tea cup and looked critically at her
own fingerbones. “ ‘Course, I don’t remember that. In fact, I
don’t even know you, Kovacs. Last thing I remember was putting myself
into the tank about a month back. Everything after that’s gone. The me
you torched in that cruiser, she’s dead. That wasn’t me. So, no
hard feelings, huh?”

“No
remote storage, Trepp?”

She
snorted. “Are you kidding? I make a living doing this, same as you, but
not that much. Anyway, who needs that remote shit? The way I figure it, you
fuck up, you’ve got to pay some kind of tab for it. I fucked up with you,
right?”

I sipped my
own tea and played back the fight in the aircar, considering the angles.
“You were a little slow,” I conceded. “A little
careless.”

“Yeah,
careless. I got to watch that. Wearing artificials makes you that way. Very
anti-Zen. I got a
sensei
in New York, it drives him up the fucking
wall.”

“That’s
too bad,” I said patiently. “You want to tell me who sent you
now?”

“Hey,
better than that. You’re invited to meet the Man.” She nodded at my
expression. “Yeah, Ray wants to talk to you. Same as last time, except
this is a voluntary ride. Seems coercion doesn’t work too well with
you.”

“And
Kadmin? He in on this as well?”

Trepp drew
breath in through her teeth. “Kadmin’s, well, Kadmin’s a bit
of a side issue right now. Bit of an embarrassment really. But I think we can
deal on that as well. I really can’t tell you too much more now.”
She shuttled her glance sideways at Sullivan, who was beginning to sit up and
pay attention. “It’s better if we go someplace else.”

“All
right.” I nodded. “I’ll follow you out. But let’s have
a couple of ground rules before we go. One, no virtuals.”

“Way
ahead of you there.” Trepp finished her tea and started to get up from
the table. “My instructions are to convey you directly to Ray. In the
flesh.”

I put a
hand on her arm and she stopped moving abruptly.

“Two.
No surprises. You tell me exactly what’s going to happen well before it
does. Anything unexpected, and you’re likely to be disappointing your
sensei
all over again.”

“Fine.
No surprises.” Trepp produced a slightly forced smile that told me she
wasn’t accustomed to being grabbed by the arm. “We’re going
to walk out of the restaurant and catch a taxi. That all right by you?”

“Just
so long as it’s empty.” I released her arm and she resumed motion,
coming fluidly upright, hands still well away from her sides. I reached into my
pocket and tossed a couple of plastic notes at Sullivan. “You stay here.
If I see your face come through the door before we’re gone, I’ll
put a hole in it. Tea’s on me.”

As I
followed Trepp to the door, the waiter arrived with Sullivan’s tea cup
and a big white handkerchief, presumably for the warden’s smashed lip.
Nice kid. He practically tripped over himself trying to stay out of my way, and
the look he gave me was mingled disgust and awe. In the wake of the icy fury
that had possessed me earlier, I sympathised more than he could have known.

The young
men in silk watched us go with the dead-eyed concentration of snakes.

Outside, it
was still raining. I turned up my collar and watched as Trepp produced a
transport pager and waved it casually back and forth above her head. “Be
a minute,” she said, and gave me a curious sidelong glance. “You
know who that place belongs to?”

“I
guessed.”

She shook
her head. “Triad noodle house. Hell of a place for an interrogation. Or
do you just like living dangerously?”

I shrugged.
“Where I come from, criminals stay out of other people’s fights.
They’re a gutless lot, generally. Much more likely to get interference
from a solid citizen.”

“Not
around here. Most solid citizens around here are a little too solid to get
involved in a brawl on some stranger’s behalf. The way they figure it,
that’s what the police are for. You’re from Harlan’s World,
right?”

“That’s
right.”

“Maybe
it’s that Quellist thing, then. You reckon?”

“Maybe.”

An autocab
came spiralling down through the rain in response to the pager. Trepp stood
aside at the open hatch and made an irony of demonstrating the empty
compartment within. I smiled thinly.

“After
you.”

“Suit
yourself.” She climbed aboard and moved over to let me in. I settled back
on the seat opposite her and watched her hands. When she saw where I was
looking, she grinned and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the seat.
The hatch hinged down, shedding rain in sliding sheets.

“Welcome
to Urbline services,” said the cab smoothly. “Please state your
destination.”

“Airport,”
said Trepp, lounging back in her seat and looking for my reaction.
“Private carriers’ terminal.”

The cab
lifted. I looked past Trepp at the rain on the rear window. “Not a local
trip, then,” I said tonelessly.

She brought
her arms in again, hands held palm upward. “Well, we figured you
wouldn’t go virtual, so now we have to do it the hard way. Sub-orbital.
Take about three hours.”

“Sub-orbital?”
I drew a deep breath and touched the bolstered Philips gun lightly. “You
know, I’m going to get really upset if someone asks me to check this
hardware before we fly.”

“Yeah,
we figured that too. Relax Kovacs, you heard me say private terminal. This is a
custom flight, just for you. Carry a fucking tactical nuke on board if you
like. OK?”

“Where
are we going, Trepp?”

She smiled.

“Europe,” she
said.

Wherever it was in Europe that we
landed, the weather was better. We left the blunt, windowless sub-orbital
sitting on the fused glass runway, and walked to the terminal building through
glinting sunlight that was a physical pressure on my body, even through my
jacket. The sky above was an uncompromising blue from horizon to horizon, and
the air felt hard and dry. According to the pilot’s time-check, it was
still only mid afternoon. I shrugged my way out of the jacket.

“Should
be a limo waiting for us,” Trepp said over her shoulder.

We passed,
without formality, into the terminal and across a zone of micro-climate where
palms and other less recognisable tropicalia made a bid for the massive glass
ceiling. A misty rain drifted down from sprinkler systems, rendering the air
pleasantly damp after the aridity outside. Along the aisles set between the
trees, children played and squalled, and old people sat dozily on wrought iron
benches in a seemingly impossible co-existence. The middle generations were
gathered in knots at coffee stands, talking with more gesticulation than
I’d seen in Bay City and seemingly oblivious to the factors of time and
schedule that govern most terminal buildings.

I adjusted
the jacket across my shoulder to cover my weapons as much as possible and
followed Trepp into the trees. It wasn’t quick enough to beat the gaze of
two security guards standing under a palm nearby, or that of a little girl
scuffing her toes along the side of the aisle towards us. Trepp made a sign to
the security as they stiffened, and they fell back into their previous relaxed
postures with nods. Clearly, we were expected. The little girl wasn’t so
easily bought—she stared up at me with wide eyes until I made a pistol
out of my fingers and shot her with noisy sound effects. Then she showed her
teeth in a huge grin and hid behind the nearest bench. I heard her shooting me
in the back all the way along the aisle.

Outside
again, Trepp steered me past a mob of taxis to where an anonymous black cruiser
was idling in a no-waiting zone. We climbed into air-conditioned cool and pale
grey automould seating.

“Ten
minutes,” she promised, as we rose into the air. “What did you
think of the micro-climate?”

“Very
nice.”

“Got
them all over the airport. Weekends, people come out from the centre to spend
the day here. Weird, huh?”

I grunted
and watched the window as we banked over the whorled settlement patterns of a
major city. Further out, a dusty-looking plain stretched to the horizon and the
almost painful blue of the sky. To the left, I could make out the rise of
mountains.

Trepp
seemed to pick up on my disinclination to talk and she busied herself with a
phone jack that she plugged in behind the ear with the ironic pendant. Another
internal chip. Her eyes closed as she began the call, and I was left with the
peculiar feeling of aloneness that you get when someone’s using one of
those things.

Alone was
fine with me.

The truth
was that I’d been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the
journey. In the cabin of the sub-ship I’d been steadfastly withdrawn
despite Trepp’s obvious interest in my background. Finally she gave up trying
to extract anecdotes about Harlan’s World and the Corps and tried instead
to teach me a couple of card games she knew. Impelled by some ghost of cultural
politeness, I reciprocated, but two isn’t an ideal number for cards and
neither of our hearts was in it. We landed in Europe in silence, each flipping
through our own selection from the jet’s media stack. Despite
Trepp’s apparent lack of concern on the subject, I was having a hard time
forgetting the circumstances of our last trip together.

Below us,
the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in
particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made.
As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that
meant she hadn’t bothered to disconnect the chip synapses
first—strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was
showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were
landing beside.

It was a
massive stone cross, larger than any I’d seen before and weather-stained
with age. As the cruiser spiralled down towards its base and then beyond, I
realised that whoever had built the monument had set it on a huge central
buttress of rock so it gave the impression of a titanic broadsword sunk into the
earth by some retired warrior god. It was entirely in keeping with the
dimensions of the mountains around it, as if no human agency could possibly
have put it there. The stepped terraces of stone and ancillary buildings below
the buttress, themselves monumental in size, shrank almost to insignificance
under the brooding presence of this single artefact.

Trepp was
watching me with a glitter in her eyes.

The limo
settled on one of the stone expanses and I climbed out, blinking up through the
sun at the cross.

“This
belong to the Catholics?” I hazarded.

“Used
to.” Trepp started towards a set of towering steel doors in the rock
ahead. “Back when it was new. It’s private property now.”