Altered Carbon (53 page)

And despite
it all, there was space for this measure of quiet.

Take
what is offered and that must sometimes be enough
.

My gaze
slipped out past the breakers. The ocean beyond was black and secret, merging
seamlessly with the night a scant distance out from the shore. Even the massive
bulk of the keeled-over
Free Trade Enforcer
was hard to make out. I
imagined Mary Lou Hinchley hurtling down to her shattering impact with the
unyielding water, then slipping broken beneath the swells to be cradled in wait
for the sea’s predators. How long had she been out there before the
currents contrived to carry what was left of her back to her own kind? How long
had the darkness held her?

My thoughts
skipped aimlessly, cushioned on the vague sense of acceptance and well-being. I
saw Bancroft’s antique telescope, trained on the heavens and the tiny
motes of light that were Earth’s first hesitant steps beyond the limits
of the solar system. Fragile arks carrying the recorded selves of a million
pioneers and the deep-frozen embryo banks that might someday re-sleeve them on
distant worlds, if the promise of the vaguely understood Martian astrogation
charts bore fruit. If not they would drift forever, because the universe is
mostly night and darkened ocean.

Raising an
eyebrow at my own introspection, I heaved myself off the rail and glanced up at
the holographic face above my head. Anchana Salomao had the night to herself.
Her ghostly countenance gazed down at repeated intervals along the promenade,
compassionate but uninvolved. Looking at the composed features, it was easy to
see why Elizabeth Elliott had wanted so badly to attain those heights. I would
have given a lot for that same detached composure. I shifted my attention to
the windows above Elliott’s. The lights were on there, and as I watched a
female form moved across one of them in naked silhouette. I sighed, spun the
stub of my cigarette into the gutter and took refuge in the limo. Let Anchana
keep the vigil. I called up channels at random on the entertainment deck and
let the mindless barrage of images and sounds numb me into a kind of
half-sleep. The night passed around the vehicle like cold mist and I suffered
the vague sensation that I was drifting away from the lights of the
Elliotts’ home, out to sea on snapped moorings with nothing between me
and the horizon where there was a storm building …

A sharp
rapping on the window beside my head shook me awake. I jerked round from the
position I’d slumped into and saw Trepp standing patiently outside. She
gestured at me to wind down the window, then leaned in with a grin.

“Kawahara
was right about you. Sleeping in the car so this Dipper can get laid.
You’ve got delusions of priesthood, Kovacs.”

“Shut
up, Trepp,” I said irritably. “What time is it?”

“About
five.” Her eyes swivelled up and left to consult the chip.
“Five-sixteen. Be getting light soon.”

I struggled
into a more upright position, tasting the residue of the single cigarette on my
tongue. “What are you doing here?”

“Watching
your back. We don’t want Kadmin taking you out before you can sell the
goods to Bancroft, do we? Hey, is that the Wreckers?”

I followed
her gaze forward to the entertainment deck, which was still screening some kind
of sports coverage. Minuscule figures rushed backwards and forwards on a
cross-hatched field, accompanied by a barely audible commentary. A brief
collision between two players occasioned an insectile roar of cheering. I must
have lowered the volume before I fell asleep. Switching the deck off, I saw in
the ensuing dimness that Trepp had been right. The night had washed out to a
soft blue gloom that was creeping over the buildings beside us like a bleach
stain on the darkness.

“Not
a fan, then?” Trepp nodded at the screen. “I didn’t use to
be, but you live in New York long enough, you get the habit.”

“Trepp,
how the fuck are you supposed to watch my back if your head is jammed in here
watching screen?”

Trepp gave
me a hurt look and withdrew her head. I climbed out of the limo and stretched
in the chilly air. Overhead, Anchana Salomao was still resplendent, but the
lights above Elliott’s were out.

“They
stayed up until a couple of hours ago,” said Trepp helpfully. “I
thought they might be running out on you, so I checked the back.”

I gazed up
at the darkened windows. “Why are they going to run out on me? She
hasn’t even heard what the terms of the deal are.”

“Well,
involvement in an erasure offence tends to make most people nervous.”

“Not
this woman,” I said, and wondered how much I believed myself.

Trepp
shrugged. “Suit yourself. I still think you’re crazy, though.
Kawahara’s got Dippers could do this stuff standing on their
heads.”

Since my
own reasons for not accepting Kawahara’s offer of technical support were
almost entirely instinctive, I said nothing. The icy certainty of my revelations
about Bancroft, Kawahara and Resolution 653 had faded with the previous
day’s rush of set-up details for the run, and any sense of interlocking
well-being had gone when Ortega left. All I had now was the gravity pull of
mission time, the cold dawn and the sound of the waves on the shore. The taste
of Ortega in my mouth and the warmth of her long-limbed body curled into mine
was a tropical island in the chill, receding in my wake.

“You
reckon there’s somewhere open this early that serves coffee,” I
asked.

“Town
this size?” Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. “Doubt it. But
I saw a bank of dispensers on the way in. Got to be one that does
coffee.”

“Machine
coffee?” I curled my lip.

“Hey,
what are you, a fucking connoisseur? You’re living in a hotel
that’s just one big goddamned dispenser. Christ, Kovacs, this is the
Machine Age. Didn’t anybody tell you that?”

“You
got a point. How far is it?”

“Couple
of klicks. We’ll take my car, that way if Little Miss Homecoming wakes
up, she won’t look out the window and panic.”

“Sold.”

I followed
Trepp across the street to a low-slung black vehicle that looked as if it might
be radar invisible, and climbed into a snug interior that smelled faintly of
incense.

“This
yours?”

“No,
rented. Picked it up when we flew back in from Europe. Why?”

I shook my
head. “Doesn’t matter.”

Trepp
started up and we ghosted silently along the promenade. I looked out of the
seaward window and wrestled with an insubstantial sense of frustration. The
scant hours of sleep in the limo had left me itchy. Everything about the
situation was suddenly chafing at me again, from the lack of solution to
Bancroft’s death to my relapse into smoking. I had a feeling that it was
going to be a bad day, and the sun wasn’t even up yet.

“You
thought about what you’re going to do when this is over?”

“No,”
I said morosely.

We found
the dispensers on a frontage that sloped down to the shore at one end of the
town. Clearly they had been installed with beach clientele in mind, but the
dilapidated state of the shelters that housed them suggested that trade was no
better here than for Elliott’s Data Linkage. Trepp parked the car
pointing at the sea and went to get the coffees. Through the window I watched
her kick and slam the machine until it finally relinquished two plastic cups.
She carried them back to the car and handed me mine.

“Want
to drink it here?”

“Yeah,
why not?”

We pulled
the tabs on the cups and listened to them sizzle. The mechanism didn’t
heat especially well, but the coffee tasted reasonable and it had a definite
chemical effect. I could feel my weariness sliding away. We drank slowly and
watched the sea through the windscreen, immersed in a silence that was almost
companionable.

“I
tried for the Envoys once,” said Trepp suddenly.

I glanced
sideways at her, curious. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,
long time ago. They rejected me on profile. No capacity for allegiance, they
said. ”

I grunted.
“Figures. You were never in the military, were you?”

“What
do
you
think?” She was looking at me as if I’d just
suggested she might have a history of child-molesting. I chuckled tiredly.

“Thought
not. See, the thing is, they’re looking for borderline psychopathic
tendencies. That’s why they do most of their recruiting from the military
in the first place.”

Trepp
looked put out. “I’ve
got
borderline psychopathic
tendencies.”

“Yeah,
I don’t doubt it, but the point is, the number of civilians with those
tendencies
and
a sense of team spirit is pretty limited. They’re
opposing values. The chances of them both arising naturally in the same person
are almost nil. Military training takes the natural order and fucks with it. It
breaks down any resistance to psychopathic behaviour at the same time as it
builds fanatical loyalties to the group. Package deal. Soldiers are perfect
Envoy material.”

“You
make it sound like I had a lucky escape.”

For a few
seconds I stared out to the horizon, remembering.

“Yeah.”
I drained the rest of my coffee. “Come on, let’s get back.”

As we drove
back along the promenade, something had changed in the quiet between us.
Something that, like the gradually waxing light of dawn around the car, was at
once intangible and impossible to ignore.

When we
pulled up outside the data broker’s frontage, Irene Elliott was waiting,
leaned against the side of the limo and watching the sea. There was no sign of
her husband.

“Better
stay here,” I told Trepp as I climbed out. “Thanks for the
coffee.”

“Sure.”

“I
guess I’ll be seeing you in my rear-view screen for a while, then.”

“I
doubt you’ll see me at all, Kovacs,” said Trepp cheerfully.
“I’m better at this than you are.”

“Remains
to be seen.”

“Yeah,
yeah. Be seeing you.” She raised her voice as I started to walk away.
“And don’t fuck up that run. We’d all hate to see that
happen.”

She backed
up the car a dozen metres and kicked it into the air in a showy, dropped-nose
bunt that shattered the quiet with a shriek of turbines and barely cleared our
heads before flipping up and out over the ocean.

“Who
was that?” There was a huskiness to Irene Elliott’s voice that
sounded like the residue of too much crying.

“Back-up,”
I said absently, watching the car trail out over the wrecked aircraft carrier.
“Works for the same people. Don’t worry, she’s a
friend.”

“She
may be your friend,” said Elliott bitterly. “She isn’t mine.
None of you people are.”

I looked at
her, then back out to sea. “Fair enough.”

Silence,
apart from the waves. Elliott shifted against the polished coachwork of the
limo.

“You
know what’s happened to my daughter,” she said in a dead voice.
“You knew all the time.”

I nodded.

“And
you don’t give a flying fuck, do you? You’re working for the man
that used her like a piece of toilet tissue.”

“Lots
of men used her,” I said brutally. “She let herself be used. And
I’m sure your husband’s told you why she did that as well.”

I heard
Irene Elliott’s breath catch in her throat and concentrated on the
horizon, where Trepp’s cruiser was fading into the predawn gloom.
“She did it for the same reason she tried to blackmail the man I was
working for, the same reason she tried to put drivers on a particularly
unpleasant man called Jerry Sedaka who subsequently had her killed. She did it
for you, Irene.”

“You
fuck.” She started to cry, a small hopeless sound in the stillness.

I kept my
eyes fixed on the ocean. “I don’t work for Bancroft any
more,” I said carefully. “I’ve swapped sides on that piece of
shit. I’m giving you the chance to hit Bancroft where it hurts, to hit
him with the guilt that fucking your daughter never gave him. Plus, now
you’re out of the store maybe you’ll be able to get the money
together and re-sleeve Elizabeth. Or at least get her off stack, rent her some
space in a virtual condo or something. The point is, you’re off the ice,
you can do something. You’ve got options. That’s what I’m
offering you. I’m dealing you back into the game. Don’t throw that
away.”

Beside me,
I heard her struggling to force down the tears. I waited.

“You’re
pretty impressed with yourself, aren’t you?” she said finally.
“You think you’re doing me this big favour, but you’re no
fucking Good Samaritan. I mean, you got me out of the store, but it all comes
at a price, right?”

“Of
course it does,” I said quietly.

“I do
what you want, this virus run. I break the law for you, or I go back on stack.
And if I squeal, or screw up, I’ve got more to lose than you.
That’s the deal, isn’t it? Nothing for free.”