Altered Carbon (58 page)

“Don’t
get poetic on me, Carnage. Where is he?”

“Oh,
very well. This way.”

There was a
brace of large sentries outside the cabin door that might have been the two
from the cruiser. I was too jangled to remember clearly. They bracketed me as
we followed Carnage along claustrophobic corridors and down listing
companionways, all rust-spotted and polymer-varnished metal. I tried vaguely to
memorise the path but most of me was thinking about what Carnage had said. Who
had predicted my actions to him? Kadmin? Unlikely. The Patchwork Man, for all
his fury and death threats, knew next to nothing about me. The only real
candidate for that kind of prediction was Reileen Kawahara. Which also helped
to explain why Carnage wasn’t quaking in his synthetic flesh at the
thought of what Kawahara might do to him for co-operating with Kadmin. Kawahara
had sold me out. Bancroft was convinced, the crisis—whatever it had
been—was over, and the same day Ortega was snatched as bait. The scenario
I had sold to Bancroft left Kadmin out there as a private contractor with a
grudge, so there was no reason why he couldn’t be seen to take me down.
And under the circumstances, I was safer disposed of than left alive.

For that
matter, so was Kadmin so maybe it hadn’t been that blatant. Maybe the
word had gone out to bring Kadmin down, but only for as long as I was needed.
With Bancroft convinced, I was once more expendable and the word had gone out
again, to let Kadmin be. He could kill me, or I could kill him, whichever way
the luck turned. Leaving Kawahara to clean up whoever was left.

I had no
doubt that Kawahara would keep her word as far as releasing Sarah was
concerned. The old-style yakuza were funny about that sort of thing. But she
had made no such binding promises about me.

We
clambered down a final staircase, a little wider than the rest, and came out
onto a glassed-in gantry over a converted cargo cell. Looking down, I saw one
of the arenas Ortega and I had passed in the electromag train last week, but
now the plastic coverings were off the killing ring, and a modest crowd had
assembled in the forward rows of each bank of plastic seating. Through the
glass I could hear the sustained buzz of excitement and anticipation that had
always preceded the freak fights I’d attended in my youth.

“Ah,
your public awaits you.” Carnage was standing at my shoulder.
“Well, more correctly, Ryker’s public. Though I have no doubt
you’ll be able to dissemble for them with the same skill that convinced
me.”

“And
if I choose not to?”

Carnage’s
crude features formed a simulacrum of distaste. He gestured out at the crowd.
“Well, I suppose you could try explaining it to them in mid bout. But to
be honest, the acoustics aren’t of the best and anyway…” He
smiled unpleasantly. “I doubt you’ll have the time.”

“Foregone
conclusion, huh?”

Carnage
maintained his smile. Behind him, Pernilla Grip and the other synthetic were
watching me with the predatory interest of cats in front of a birdcage. Below,
the crowd were becoming noisy with expectation.

“It
has taken me a while to set up this particular bout, working on nothing more
than Kadmin’s assurances. They are anxious to see Elias Ryker pay for his
transgressions and it would be quite hazardous not to fulfill their
expectations. Not to mention unprofessional. But then, I do not think you came
here expecting to survive, did you Mr.Kovacs?”

I
remembered the darkening, deserted street called Minna and the crumpled form of
Ortega. I fought the stunblast sickness and raised a smile from old stock.

“No,
I suppose I didn’t.”

Quiet
footsteps along the gantry. I fired a peripheral glance towards the sound and
found Kadmin, attired in the same clothing as I wore. The spacedeck slippers
scuffed to a soft halt a short distance away, and he cocked his head at an
angle, as if examining me for the first time. He spoke gently.

“
How
shall I explain the dying that was done
?

Shall I
say that each one did the math, and wrote

The
value of his days

Against
the bloody margin, in an understated hand
?

They
will want to know

How was
the audit done
?

And I
shall say that it was done
,

For
once
,

By
those who knew the worth

Of what
was spent that day
.”

I smiled
grimly. “
If you want to lose a fight, talk about it first
.”

“But
she was younger in those days.” Kadmin smiled back, perfect white teeth
against the tanned skin. “Barely out of her teens, if the introduction to
my copy of
Furies
got it right.”

“Harlan’s
World teens last longer. I think she knew what she was talking about. Can we
get on with this, please?”

Beyond the windows, the
noise of the crowd was rising like surf on a hard shingle beach.

Out on the killing floor, the noise was
less uniform, more uneven. Individual voices sawed across the background like
bottleback fins in choppy water, though without applying the neurachem I still
couldn’t pick out anything intelligible. Only one shout made it through
the general roar; as I stepped up to the edge of the ring, someone yelled down
at me:

“Remember
my brother, you
motherfucker
!!!”

I glanced
up to see who the family grudge belonged to, but saw only a sea of angry and
anticipatory faces. Several of them were on their feet, waving fists and
stamping so that the metal scaffolding drummed with it. The bloodlust was
building like something tangible, leaving a thickness in the air that was
unpleasant to breathe. I tried to remember whether I and my gang peers had
screamed like this at the Newpest freak fights, and guessed that we probably
had. And we hadn’t even known the combatants that flailed and clawed at
each other for our entertainment. These people at least had some emotional
investment in the blood they wanted to see spilled.

On the
other side of the floor, Kadmin waited with his arms folded. The supple steel
of the power knuckles banded across the fingers of each hand glinted in the
overhead lighting. It was a subtle advantage, one which wouldn’t render
the fight too one-sided but would tell in the long run. I wasn’t really
worried about the knuckles, it was Kadmin’s Will of God enhanced response
wiring that concerned me most. A little over a century ago, I’d been up
against the same system in the soldiers the Protectorate had been fighting on
Sharya, and they’d been no pushover. It was old stuff, but it was
heavy-duty military biomech, and against that Ryker’s neurachem, recently
fried by stun-bolt, was going to look pretty sick.

I took my
place opposite Kadmin, as indicated by the markings on the floor. Around me the
crowd quietened down a little and the spotlights came up as Emcee Carnage
joined us. Robed and made up for Pernilla Grip’s cameras, he looked like
a malignant doll out of a child’s nightmare. A fitting consort to the
Patchwork Man. He raised his hands and directional speakers in the walls of the
converted cargo cell amplified his throat-miked words.

“Welcome
to the
Panama Rose
!”

There was a
vague rumble from the crowd, but they were bedded down for the moment, waiting.
Carnage knew this and he turned slowly about, milking the anticipation.

“To a
very special, and very exclusive,
Panama Rose
event, welcome. Welcome,
I bid you welcome, to
the most final and bloody humiliation of Elias Ryker
.”

They went
wild. I raised my eyes to their faces in the gloom and saw the thin skin of
civilisation stripped away, the rage laid out like raw flesh beneath.

Carnage’s
amplified voice trod down the noise. He was making quietening gestures with
both arms.

“Most
of you will remember detective Ryker from some encounter or other. For some of
you it will be a name that you associate with blood spilled, maybe even bones
broken.

“Those
memories. Those memories are painful; and some of you might think you can never
lose them.”

He had them
damped down now, and his voice dropped accordingly.

“My
friends, I cannot hope to erase those memories for you, for that is not what we
offer aboard the
Panama Rose
. Here we deal not in soft forgetfulness,
but in remembrance, no matter how bitter that remembrance might be. Not in
dreams, my friends, but in reality.” He threw out a hand to indicate me.
“My friends,
this
is reality.”

Another
round of whoops. I glanced across at Kadmin and raised my eyebrows in
exasperation. I thought I might die, but I hadn’t expected to be bored to
death. Kadmin shrugged. He wanted the fight. Carnage’s theatricals were
just the slightly distasteful price he had to pay for it.

“This
is reality,” Emcee Carnage repeated. “Tonight is reality. Tonight
you will watch Elias Ryker die, die on his knees, and if I cannot erase the
memories of your bodies being beaten and your bones being broken, I can at
least replace them with the sounds of your tormenter being broken instead.”

The crowd
erupted.

I wondered
briefly if Carnage was exaggerating. The truth about Ryker was an elusive
thing, it seemed. I remembered leaving Jerry’s Closed Quarters, the way
Oktai had flinched away from me when he saw Ryker’s face. Jerry himself
telling me about the Mongol’s run-in with the cop whose body I was
wearing:
Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death
couple of years back
. And then there was Bautista on Ryker’s
interrogation techniques:
He’s right on the line most of the time
.
How many times had Ryker gone over that line, to have attracted this crowd?

What would
Ortega have said?

I thought
about Ortega, and the image of her face was a tiny pocket of calm amidst the
jeering and yelling that Carnage had whipped up. With luck and what I’d
left her at the Hendrix, she’d take Kawahara down for rue.

Knowing it
was enough.

Carnage
drew a heavy-bladed, serrated knife from his robes and held it aloft. A
relative quiet descended on the chamber.

“The
coup
de grâce
,” he proclaimed. “When our matador has put
Elias Ryker down so that he no longer has the strength to rise, you will see
the stack cut from his living spine and smashed, and you will know that he is
no more.”

He released
the knife and let his arm fall again. Pure theatre. The weapon hung in the air,
glinting in a focal grav field, then drifted upwards to a height of about five
metres at the mid-point of the killing floor.

“Let
us begin,” said Carnage, withdrawing.

There was a
magical moment then, a kind of release, almost as if an experia scene had just
been shot, and we could all stand down now and relax, maybe pass round a whisky
flask and clown about behind the scanners. Joke about the cliché-ridden
script we were being forced to play out.

We began to
circle, still the width of the killing floor apart and no guard up to even hint
at what we were about to do. I tried to read Kadmin’s body language for
clues.

The
Will of God biomech systems 3.1 through 7 are simple, but not to be scorned on
that account
, they had told us prior
to the Sharya landings.
The imperatives for the builders were strength and
speed, and in both of these they have excelled. If they have a weakness it is
that their combat patterning has no random select sub-routine. Right Hand of
God martyrs will therefore tend to fight and go on fighting within a very
narrow band of techniques
.

On Sharya,
our own enhanced combat systems had been state of the art, with both random
response and analysis feedback built in as standard. Ryker’s neurachem
had nothing approaching that level of sophistication, but I might be able to
simulate it with a few Envoy tricks. The real trick was to stay alive long
enough for my conditioning to analyse the Will of God’s fighting pattern
and—

Kadmin
struck.

The
distance was nearly ten metres of clear ground; he covered it in the time it
took me to blink, and hit me like a storm.

The
techniques were all simple, linear punches and kicks, but delivered with such
power and speed that it was all I could do to block them. Counter-attack was
out of the question. I steered the first punch outward right and used the
momentum to sidestep left. Kadmin followed the shift without hesitation and
went for my face. I rolled my head away from the strike and felt the fist graze
my temple, not hard enough to trigger the power knuckles. Instinct told me to
block low and the knee-shattering straight kick turned off my forearm. A
follow-up elbow strike caught me on top of the head and I reeled backward,
fighting to stay on my feet. Kadmin came after me. I snapped out a right-hand
sidestrike, but he had the attack momentum and he rode the blow almost
casually. A low level punch snaked through and hit me in the belly. The power
knuckles detonated with a sound like meat tossed into a frying pan.