Altered Carbon

PART 2 : REACTION
(INTRUSION CONFLICT)


CHAPTER NINE
I called Prescott from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.
“Kovacs. Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Still don’t really know what I’m looking for,” I said cheerfully. “You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?”
She pulled a face. “Oh, please.”
“All right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin joints?”
“I really have no idea, Kovacs.”
“Well, look it up then. I’ll hold.” My voice came out stony. Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.
I drummed my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found myself muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.
“Here we are.” Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Begin’s Oakland records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted her.”
Bancroft would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation to say it.
“You got an image there?”
“Of Begin?” Prescott shrugged. “Only a two-d. You want me to send it.”
“Please.”
The ancient earphone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.
“Right. Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked. Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.”
“Mariposa and San Bruno,” Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind Leila Begin’s full service pout. “Jesus, it’s right under the old expressway. That’s got to be a safety violation.”
“Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge?”
“You’re going there? Tonight?”
“Prescott, these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,” I said patiently. “Of course I’m going there tonight.”
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.
“It’s not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.”
This time I couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody. She must have heard me.
“I’m sending the map,” she said stiffly.
Leila Begin’s face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her any more. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s Kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.
Miriam Bancroft.

There was rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the ‘caster and the image kept fizzling out.
I’d been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.
I watched for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests—you can’t argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.
I climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as I approached.
“Sell you a disc, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.”
I gave them one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.
“Stiff?”
Another shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said ‘clear’. One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.
“Do you want cabins or bar?”
I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. “What’s the deal in the bar?”
“Ha ha ha.” Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”
“Cabins,” I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.
“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”
I went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.
The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it didn’t show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.
I’d seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the way down through the city. I selected one of the large denomination plastified notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.
“Do you want to see me see me see me …?”
Cheap echo box on the vocoder.
I pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.
“Do you want to touch me touch me touch me …?”
Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to me, one hand slid out, cupping.
“Tell me what you want, honey,” she said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.
I cleared my own. “What’s your name?”
“Anenome. Want to know why they call me that?”
Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.
“You remember a girl used to work here?” I asked.
She was working on my belt now. “Honey, any girl used to work here ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—”
“She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.”
Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.
“What the f*ck is this? You the Sia?”
“The what?”
“Sia. The heat.” Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. “We had this, man—”
“No.” I took a step towards her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. I backed up again, voice low. “No, I’m her mother.”
Taut silence. She glared at me.
“Bullshit. Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.”
“No.” I pulled her hand back to my groin. “Feel. There’s nothing there. They sleeved me in this, but I’m a woman. I don’t, I couldn’t…”
She unbent fractionally from her crouch, hands tugging down almost unwillingly. “That looks like prime tank flesh to me,” she said untrustingly. “You just come out of the store, how come you’re not paroled in some bonebag junkie’s sleeve?”
“It’s not parole.” The Corps’ deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapour-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. “You know what I went down for?”
“Lizzie said mindbites, something—”
“Yeah. Dipping. You know who I Dipped?”
“No. Lizzie never talked much about—”
“Elizabeth didn’t know. And it never came out on the wires.”
The heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. “So who—”
I skinned her a smile. “Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this.”
“Not powerful enough to get you back in something with a p-ssy, though.” Anenome’s voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was coming up fast, like a bottleback school under reef water. She wanted to believe this fairytale mother come looking for her lost daughter. “How come you’re cross-sleeved?”
“There’s a deal,” I told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story. “This … person … gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs a man’s body. If I do it, I get a new sleeve for me and Elizabeth.”
“That so? So why you here?” There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that told me her parents would never come to this place looking for her. And that she believed me. I laid the last pieces of the lie.
“There’s a problem with re-sleeving Elizabeth. Someone’s blocking the procedure. I want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?”
She shook her head, face turned down.
“A lot of the girls get hurt,” she said quietly. “But Jerry’s got insurance to cover that. He’s real good about it, even puts us into store if it’s going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie wasn’t a regular.”
“Did Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?”
She looked up at me, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. I’d played Irene Elliott to the hilt. “Mrs.Elliott, all the people who come here are strange. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”
I made myself wince. “Anyone Important?”
“I don’t know. Look, Mrs.Elliott, I liked Lizzie, she was real kind to me a coupla times when I got down, but we never got close. She was close with Chloe and…” She paused, and added hurriedly,“Nothing like that, you know, but her and Chloe, and Mac, they used to share things, you know, talk and everything.”
“Can I talk to them?”
Her eyes flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable noise. She looked hunted.
“It’s better if you don’t. Jerry, you know, he doesn’t like us talking to the public. If he catches us…”
I put every ounce of Envoy persuasiveness into stance and tone. “Well, maybe you could ask for me…”
The hunted look deepened, but her voice firmed up.
“Sure. I’ll ask around. But not. Not now. You’ve got to go. Come back tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I’ll stay free for this time. Say you made an appointment.”
I took her hand in both of mine. “Thank you, Anenome.”
“My name’s not Anenome,” she said abruptly. “I’m called Louise. Call me Louise.”
“Thank you, Louise.” I held on to her hand. “Thank you for doing this—”
“Look, I’m not promising anything,” she said with an attempt at roughness. “Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all. Now, you go. Please.”
She showed me how to cancel the remainder of my payment on the credit console, and the door hinged immediately open. No change. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t try to touch her again. I walked out through the open door and left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it for the first time.
Lit in red.

Outside, the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in negotiations with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let me pass and I stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as I passed and a flinch of recognition passed over his face.
I stopped, turning in mid-step, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the dealers. The neurachem came online like a shiver of cold water inside. I moved across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear.
“You waiting for me?” I asked the Mongol’s back, and saw how the muscles in it tensed.
Maybe one of the dealers felt it coming. He held up his exposed hand in a placatory gesture. “Look, man,” he began weakly.
I sliced him a glance out of the corner of my eye and he shut up.
“I said—”
That was when it all came apart. The Mongol pushed himself off the car hood with a roar and swatted at me with an arm the size of a ham. The blow never landed, but even deflecting it, I staggered back a pace. The dealers skinned their weapons, deadly little slabs of black and grey metal that spat and yapped in the rain. I twisted away from the traceries of fire, using the Mongol for cover, and shot a palm heel into his contorted face. Bone crunched and I came round him onto the car while the dealers were still trying to work out where I was. The neurachem made their movements into the pouring of thick honey. One gun-filled fist came tracking towards me and I smashed the fingers around the metal with a sideflung kick. The owner howled, and the edge of my hand cracked into the other dealer’s temple. Both men reeled off the car, one still moaning, the other insensible or dead. I came up into a crouch.
The Mongol took off, running.
I vaulted the roof of the ground car and went after him without thinking. The concrete jarred my feet as I landed, sent splinters of pain lancing up both shins, but the neurachem damped it down instantly and I was only a dozen metres behind. I threw out my chest and sprinted.
Ahead of me, the Mongol bounced around in my field of vision like a combat jet trying to elude pursuing fire. For a man of his size, he was remarkably fast, flitting between the marching support pillars of the expressway and into the shadows a good twenty metres ahead now. I put on speed, wincing at the sharp pains in my chest. Rain slapped at my face.
F*cking cigarettes.
We came out from under the pillars and across a deserted intersection where the traffic lights leaned at drunken angles. One of them stirred feebly, lights changing, as the Mongol passed it. A senile robot voice husked out at me. Cross now. Cross now. Cross now. I already had. The echoes followed me beseechingly up the street.
Past the derelict hulks of vehicles that hadn’t moved from their kerbside resting places in years. Barred and shuttered frontages that might or might not be rolled up for business during daylight hours, steam rising from a grate in the side of the street like something alive. The paving under my feet was slick with the rain and a grey muck distilled from items of decaying garbage. The shoes that had come with Bancroft’s summer suit were thin-soled and devoid of useful grip. Only the perfect balance of the neurachem kept me upright.
The Mongol cast a glance back over his shoulder as he came level with two parked wrecks, saw I was still there and broke left across the street as soon as he cleared the last vehicle. I tried to adjust my trajectory and cut him off, crossing the street at an angle before I reached the wrecked cars, but my quarry had timed the trap too well. I was already on the first wreck, and I skidded trying to stop in time. I bounced off the hood of the rusting vehicle into a shopfront shutter. The metal clanged and sizzled; a low-current anti-loitering charge stung my hands. Across the street, the Mongol stretched the distance between us by another ten metres.
A wayward speck of traffic moved in the sky above me.
I spotted the fleeing figure on the other side of the street and kicked off from the kerb, cursing the impulse that had made me turn down Bancroft’s offer of armaments. At this range a beam weapon would have carved the Mongol’s legs out from under him easily. Instead, I tucked in behind him and tried to find the lung capacity from somewhere to close up the gap again. Maybe I could panic him into tripping.
That wasn’t what happened, but it was close enough. The buildings to our left gave way to waste ground bordered by a sagging fence. The Mongol looked back again and made his first mistake. He stopped, threw himself on the fence, which promptly collapsed, and scrambled over into the darkness beyond. I grinned and followed. Finally, I had the advantage.
Perhaps he was hoping to lose himself in the darkness, or expecting me to twist an ankle over the uneven ground. But the Envoy conditioning squeezed my pupils into instant dilation in the low-light surroundings and mapped my steps over the uneven surface with lightning speed, and the neurachem put my feet there with a rapidity to match. The ground ghosted by beneath me the way it had beneath Jimmy de Soto in my dream. Given a hundred metres of this I was going to overtake my Mongol friend, unless he too had augmented vision.
In the event, the waste ground ran out before that, but by then there was barely the original dozen metres between us when we both hit the fence on the far side. He scaled the wire, dropped to the ground and started up the street while I was still climbing, but then, abruptly, he appeared to stumble. I cleared the top of the fence and swung down lightly. He must have heard me drop though, because he spun out of the huddle, still not finished with clipping together the thing in his hands. The muzzle came up and I dived for the street.
I hit hard, skinning my hands and rolling. Lightning torched the night where I had been. The stink of ozone washed over me and the crackle of disrupted air curled in my ears. I kept rolling and the particle blaster lit up again, charring past my shoulder. The damp street hissed with steam in its wake. I scrambled for cover that wasn’t there.
“LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”
A cluster of pulsating lights dropped vertically from above and the tannoy barked down the night like the voice of a robot god. A searchlight exploded in the street and flooded us with white fire. From where I lay, I screwed up my eyes and could just make out the police transport, a regulation crowd-control five metres off the street, lights flashing. The soft storm of its turbines swept flapping wings of paper and plastic up against the walls of nearby buildings and pinned them there like dying moths.
“STAND WHERE YOU ARE!” the tannoy thundered again. “LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”
The Mongol brought his particle blaster round in a searing arc and the transport bucked as its pilot tried to avoid the beam. Sparks showered off one turbine where the weapon found its mark and the transport sideslipped badly. Machine-rifle fire answered from a mounting somewhere below the vessel’s nose, but by that time the Mongol was across the street, had torched down a door and was gone through the smoking gap.
Screams from somewhere within.
I picked myself slowly up off the ground and watched as the transport settled to within a metre of the ground. An extinguisher canister fumed into life on the smouldering engine canopy and dripped white foam onto the street. Just behind the pilot’s window, a hatch whined up and Kristin Ortega stood framed in the opening.