Altered Carbon (69 page)

“Yeah,
that’ll do nicely,” she said and looked absently down at her own
left arm, where blood was trickling from the rent in her blouse.
“You’re going to fucking pay for that, Kovacs.”

She walked
across to Trepp’s motionless form. “And you, you fuck,” she
said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move.
“What did this motherfucker do for you, anyway? Promise to eat your cunt
for the next decade?”

Trepp made
no response. I strained the fingers of my left hand and managed to move them a
few centimetres across the floor towards my leg. Kawahara went to the desk with
a final backward glance at Trepp’s body and touched a control.

“Security?”

“Ms.Kawahara.”
It was the same male voice that had grilled Ortega on our approach to the
airship. “There’s been an incursion on the—”

“I
know what there’s been,” said Kawahara tiredly. “I’ve
been wrestling with it for the last five minutes. Why aren’t you down
here?”

“Ms.Kawahara?”

“I
said, how long does it take you to get your synthetic ass down here on a call
out?”

There was a
brief silence. Kawahara waited, head bowed over the desk. I reached across my
body and my right and left hands met in a weak clasp, then curled closed on
what they held and fell back.

“Ms.Kawahara,
there was no alert from your cabin.”

“Oh.”
Kawahara turned back to look at Trepp. “OK, well get someone down here
now. Squad of four. There’s some garbage to take out.”

“Yes,
ma’am.”

In spite of
everything, I felt a smile crawl onto my mouth.
Ma’am
?

Kawahara
came back, scooping the pliers up off the floor on her way. “What are you
grinning at, Kovacs?”

I tried to
spit at her, but the saliva barely made it out of my mouth and hung in a thick
streamer over my jaw, mingled with the blood. Kawahara’s face distorted
with sudden rage and she kicked me in the stomach. On top of everything else, I
barely felt it.

“You,”
she began savagely, then forced the level of her voice back down to an
accentless icy calm, “have caused more than enough trouble for one
lifetime.”

She took
hold of my collar and dragged me up the angled slope of the window until we
were at eye level. My head lolled back on the glass and she leaned over me. Her
tone eased back, almost to conversational.

“Like
the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum
life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw
material—that’s all you’ve ever been. You could have evolved
beyond it and joined me on New Beijing, but you spat in my face and went back
to your little people existence. You could have joined us again, here on Earth,
joined in the steerage of the whole human race this time. You could have been a
man of power, Kovacs. Do you understand that? You could have been
significant
.”

“I
don’t think so,” I murmured weakly, starting to slide back down the
glass. “I’ve still got a conscience rattling around in here
somewhere. Just forgotten where I put it.”

Kawahara
grimaced and redoubled her hold on my collar. “Very witty. Spirited.
You’re going to need that, where you’re going.”

“
When
they ask how I died
,” I said, “
tell them: still angry
.”

“Quell.”
Kawahara leaned closer. She was almost lying on top of me now, like a sated
lover. “But Quell never went into virtual interrogation, did she? You
aren’t going to die angry, Kovacs. You’re going to die pleading.
Over. And over. Again.”

She shifted
her hold to my chest and pressed me down hard. The pliers came up.

“Have
an aperitif.”

The jaws of
the tool plunged into the underside of my eye and a spurt of blood sprinkled
Kawahara’s face. Pain flared brightly. For a moment, I could see the
pliers through the eye they were embedded in, towering away like a massive
steel pylon, and then Kawahara twisted the jaws and something burst. My vision
splashed red and then winked out, a dying monitor screen like the ones at
Elliott’s Data Linkage. From my other eye I saw Kawahara withdraw the
pliers with Reese’s recording wire gripped in the jaws. The rear end of
the tiny device dripped minute spots of gore onto my cheek.

She’d
go after Elliott and Reese. Not to mention Ortega, Bautista and who knew how
many others.

“That’s
fucking enough,” I muttered in a slurred tone, and at the same moment,
driving the muscles in my thighs to work, I locked my legs around
Kawahara’s waist. My left hand slapped down flat on the sloping glass.

The muffled
crump of an explosion, and a sharp cracking.

Dialled to
the short end of its fuse option, the termite microgrenade was designed to
detonate almost instantaneously and to deliver ninety per cent of its charge to
the contact face. The remaining ten per cent still wrecked my hand, tearing the
flesh from the Khumalo marrow alloy bones and carbon-reinforced tendons,
ripping the poly-bond ligamenting apart and punching a coin-sized hole in my
palm.

On the
downward side, the window shattered like a thick plate of river ice. It seemed
to happen in slow motion. I felt the surface cave in beside me and then I was
sliding sideways into the gap. Vaguely, I registered the rush of cold air into
the cabin. Above me, Kawahara’s face had gone stupid with shock as she
realised what had happened, but she was too late. She came with me, flailing
and smashing at my head and chest, but unable to break the lock I had on her
waist. The pliers rose and fell, peeling a long strip of flesh from one
cheekbone, plunging once into my wrecked eye, but by now the pain was far away,
almost irrelevant, consumed entire by a bonfire of rage that had finally broken
through what was left of the betathanatine.

Tell
them: still angry
.

Then the
portion of glass we were struggling on gave way and tipped us out into the wind
and sky.

And we fell
…

My left arm
was paralysed in position by some damage the explosion had done, but as we
started to tumble down through the chilled darkness I brought my right hand
around and cupped the other grenade against the base of Kawahara’s skull.
I had a confused glimpse of the ocean far below, Head in the Clouds rocketing
upwards away from us and an expression on Reileen Kawahara’s face that
had left sanity as far behind as the airship. Something was screaming, but I no
longer knew if the sound came from within or without. Perception was spiralling
away from me in the shrill whistling of the air around us, and I could no
longer find my way back to the little window of individual viewpoint. The fall
was as seductive as sleep.

With what
remained of my will, I clamped grenade and skull against my own chest, hard
enough to detonate.

My last thought was the hope
that Davidson was watching his screen.

The address was, ironically enough, down
in Licktown. I left the autocab two blocks north and walked the rest of the
way, unable to quite shake an eerie feeling of synthesis, as if the machinery
of the cosmos were suddenly poking through the fabric of reality for me to see.

The
apartment I was looking for formed part of a U-shaped block with a cracked and
weed-grown concrete landing area in the centre. Amongst the array of
sad-looking ground and flight vehicles, I spotted the micro-copter immediately.
Someone had given it a purple and red-trim paint job recently, and though it
still listed wearily to one side on its pods there were shiny clusters of
expensive-looking sensor equipment fitted to the nose and tail. I nodded to
myself and went up a flight of external steps to the second floor of the block.

The door to
number seventeen was opened by an eleven-year-old boy who stared at me with
blank hostility.

“Yeah?”

“I’d
like to speak to Sheryl Bostock.”

“Yeah,
well she ain’t here.”

I sighed
and rubbed at the scar under my eye. “I think that’s probably not
true. Her copter’s in the yard, you’re her son, Daryl, and she came
off night shift about three hours ago. Will you tell her there’s someone
to see her about the Bancroft sleeve.”

“You
the Sia?”

“No,
I just want to talk. If she can help me, there might be some money in it for
her.”

The boy
stared at me for another pair of seconds, then closed the door without a word.
From inside, I heard him calling his mother. I waited, and fought the urge to
smoke.

Five minutes
later Sheryl Bostock appeared around the edge of the door, dressed in a loose
kaftan. Her synthetic sleeve was even more expressionless than her son had
been, but it was a slack-muscled blankness that had nothing to do with
attitude. Small muscle groups take a while to warm up from sleep on the cheaper
model synthetics, and this was definitely a model from the cut-price end of the
market.

“You
want to see me?” the synth voice asked unevenly. “What for?”

“I’m
a private investigator working for Laurens Bancroft,” I said as gently as
I could. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your duties at
PsychaSec. May I come in?”

She made a
small noise, one that made me think she’d probably tried to shut doors in
men’s faces before without success.

“It
won’t take long.”

She
shrugged, and opened the door wide. I passed her and stepped into a tidily kept
but threadbare room whose most important feature was clearly a sleek black
entertainment deck. The system reared off the carpeting in the far corner like
an obscure machine-god’s idol, and the remaining furniture had been
rearranged around it in obeisance. Like the microcopter’s paint job, it
looked new.

Daryl had
disappeared from view.

“Nice
deck,” I said, going over to examine the machine’s raked display
front. “When did you get it?”

“A
while ago.” Sheryl Bostock closed the door and came to stand uncertainly
in the centre of the room. Her face was waking up and now its expression
hovered midway between sleep and suspicion. “What do you want to ask
me?”

“May
I sit down?”

She
motioned me wordlessly to one of the brutally used armchairs and seated herself
opposite me on a lounger. In the gaps left by the kaftan, her synthetic flesh
looked pinkish and unreal. I looked at her for a while, wondering if I wanted
to go through with this after all.

“Well?”
She jerked her hand at me nervously. “What do you want to ask me? You
wake me up after the night shift, you’d better have a good goddamn reason
for this.”

“On
Tuesday 14th August you went into the Bancroft family’s sleeving chamber
and injected a Laurens Bancroft clone with a full hypospray of something.
I’d like to know what it was, Sheryl.”

The result
was more dramatic than I would have imagined possible. Sheryl Bostock’s
artificial features flinched violently and she recoiled as if I’d
threatened her with a riot prod.

“That’s
a part of my usual duties,” she cried shrilly. “I’m
authorised to perform chemical input on the clones.”

It
didn’t sound like her speaking. It sounded like something someone had
told her to memorise.

“Was
it synamorphesterone?” I asked quietly.

Cheap
synths don’t blush or go pale, but the look on her face conveyed the
message just as effectively. She looked like a frightened animal, betrayed by
its owner.

“How
do you know that? Who told you that?” Her voice scaled to a high sobbing.
“
You can’t know that. She said no one would know
.”

She
collapsed onto the sofa, weeping into her hands. Daryl emerged from another
room at the sound of his mother crying, hesitated in the doorway, and evidently
deciding that he couldn’t or shouldn’t do anything, stayed there,
watching me with a frightened expression on his face. I compressed a sigh and
nodded at him, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. He went cautiously
to the sofa and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder, making her start as
if from a blow. Ripples of memory stirred in me and I could feel my own
expression turning cold and grim. I tried to smile across the room at them, but
it was farcical.

I cleared
my throat. “I’m not here to do anything to you,” I said.
“I just want to know.”

It took a
minute or so for the words to get through the cobwebby veils of terror and sink
into Sheryl Bostock’s consciousness. It took even longer for her to get
her tears under control and look up at me. Beside her, Daryl stroked her head
doubtfully. I gritted my teeth and tried to stop the memories of my own
eleventh year welling up in my head. I waited.

“It
was her,” she said, finally.

Curtis
intercepted me as I came round the seaward wing of Suntouch House. His face was
darkened with anger and his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

“She
doesn’t want to talk to you,” he snarled at me.