Altered Carbon

Chapter FIFTEEN
The personal, as every one’s so f*cking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it PERSONAL. Do as much damage as you can. GET YOUR MESSAGE ACROSS. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference, the ONLY difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that IT’S NOTHING PERSONAL, mil, f*ck them. Make it personal.”
QUELLCRIST FALCONER
Things I Should Have Learnt by Now
Volume II

There was a cold blue dawn over the city by the time I got back to Licktown, and everything had the wet gunmetal sheen of recent rain. I stood in the shadow of the express-way pillars and watched the gutted street for any hint of movement. There was a feeling I needed, but it wasn’t easy to come by in the cold light of the rising day. My head was buzzing with rapid data assimilation and Jimmy de Soto floated around in the back of my mind like a restless demon familiar.
Where are you going, Tak?
To do some damage.
The Hendrix hadn’t been able to give me anything on the clinic I’d been taken to. From Deek’s promise to the Mongolian to bring a disc of my torture right back across, I supposed that the place had to be on the other side of the Bay, probably in Oakland, but that in itself wasn’t much help, even for an AI. The whole Bay area appeared to be suffused with illegal biotech activity. I was going to have to retrace my steps the hard way.
Jerry’s Closed Quarters.
Here the Hendrix had been more helpful. After a brief skirmish with some low-grade counter-intrusion systems, it laid out the biocabin club’s entrails for me on the screen in my room. Floor plan, security staffing, timetables and shifts. I slammed through it in seconds, fuelled by the latent rage from my interrogation. With the sky beginning to pale in the window behind me, I fitted the Nemex and the Philips gun in their holsters, strapped on the Tebbit knife, and went out to do some interrogating of my own.
I’d seen no sign of my tail when I let myself into the hotel, and he didn’t seem to be around when I left either. Lucky for him, I guess.
Jerry’s Closed Quarters by dawn light.
What little cheap erotic mystique had clung to the place by night was gone now. The neon and holosigns were bleached out, pinned on the building like a garish brooch on an old gown. I looked bleakly at the dancing girl, still trapped in the cocktail glass, and thought of Louise, alias Anenome, tortured to a death her religion would not let her come back from.
Make it personal.
The Nemex was in my right hand like a decision taken. As I walked towards the club, I worked the slide action on it and the metallic snap was loud in the quiet morning air. A slow, cold fury was beginning to fill me up now.
The door robot stirred as I approached and its arms came up in a warding-off gesture.
“We’re closed, friend,” the synth voice said.
I levelled the Nemex at the lintel and shot out the robot’s brain dome. The casing might have stopped smaller calibre shells, but the Nemex slugs smashed the unit to pieces. Sparks fireworked abruptly and the synth voice shrieked. The concertina octopus arms thrashed spastically, then went slack. Smoke curled from the shattered lintel housing.
Cautiously, I prodded one dangling tentacle aside with the Nemex, stepped through and met Milo coming upstairs to find out what the noise was about. His eyes widened as he saw me.
“You. What—”
I shot him through the throat, watched him flap and tumble down the steps and then, as he struggled to get back on his feet, shot him again in the face. As I went down the stairs after Milo a second heavy appeared in the dimly lit space below me, took one shocked look at Milo’s corpse and went for a clumsy-looking blaster at his belt. I nailed him twice through the chest before his ringers touched the weapon.
At the bottom of the stairs I paused, unholstered the Philips gun left-handed and stood in silence for a moment, letting the echoes of the gunfire die away in my ears. The heavy artillery rhythm that I’d come to expect of Jerry’s was still playing but the Nemex had a loud voice. On my left was the pulsing red glow of the corridor that led to the cabins, on the right a spider-web holo with a variety of pipes and bottles trapped in it and the word BAR illuminumed onto flat black doors beyond. The data in my head said a minimal security presence for the cabins—three at most, more likely down to two at this time of the morning. Milo and the nameless heavy on the stairs down, leaving one more possible. The bar was soundproofed off, wired into a separate sound system and running between two and four armed guards who doubled as bar staff.
Jerry the cheapskate.
I listened, cranking up the neurachem. From the corridor that led left I heard one of the cabin doors open stealthily and then the soft scrape of someone sliding their feet along the ground in the mistaken belief that it would make less noise than walking. Keeping my eyes fixed on the bar doors to my right, I stuck the Philips gun round the corner to the left and, without bothering to look, sewed a silent scribble of bullets across the red lit air in the corridor. The weapon seemed to sigh them out like branches blowing in a breeze. There was a strangled grunt, and then the thud and clatter of a body and weapon hitting the floor.
The doors to the bar remained closed.
I eased my head round the angle of the wall and in the stripes of red thrown by the rotating lights saw a stocky-looking woman in combat fatigues clutching at her side with one arm and clawing after a fallen handgun with the other. I stepped quickly across to the weapon and kicked it well out of her reach, then knelt beside her. I must have scored multiple hits; there was blood on her legs and her shirt was drenched in it. I laid the muzzle of the Philips gun against her forehead.
“You work security for Jerry?”
She nodded, eyes flaring white around her irises.
“One chance. Where is he?”
“Bar,” she hissed through her teeth, fighting back the pain. “Table. Back corner.”
I nodded, stood up and sighted carefully between her eyes.
“Wait, you—”
The Philips gun sighed.
Damage.
I was in the midst of the spiderweb holo, reaching for the bar doors, when they swung open and I found myself face to face with Deek. He had even less time to react to the phantom before him than Milo had. I tipped him the tiniest of formal bows, barely an inclination of my head, and then let go of the fury inside me and shot him repeatedly at waist height with both Nemex and Philips gun. He staggered back through the doors under the multiple impacts and I followed him in, still firing.
It was a wide space, dimly lit by angled spots and the subdued orange guide lights of the dancers’ runway, now abandoned. Along one wall, cool blue light shone up from behind the bar, as if it was fronting an obscure downward staircase to paradise. Behind was racked with the pipes, jack-ins and bottles on offer. The keeper of this angel’s hoard took one look at Deck, reeling backwards with his hands sunk in his ruined guts, and went for the holdout below the bar at a speed that was truly semi-divine.
I heard the dropped glass shatter, threw out the Nemex and hammered him back against the displayed wares on the wall like an impromptu crucifixion. He hung there a moment, curiously elegant, then turned and clawed down a racket of bottles and pipes on his way to the floor. Deek went down too, still moving, and a dim, bulky-looking form leaned against the edge of the runway leapt forward, clearing a handgun from the waist. I left the Nemex focused on the bar—no time to turn and aim—and snapped off a shot from the Philips gun, half-raised. The figure grunted and staggered, losing his weapon and slumping against the runway. My left arm raised, straightened and the head shot punched him back onto the dance platform.
The Nemex echoes were still dying in the corners of the room.
By now I had sight of Jerry. He was ten metres away, surging to his feet behind a flimsy table when I levelled the Nemex. He froze.
“Wise man.” The neurachem was singing like wires, and there was an adrenalin grin hanging crazily off my face. My mind rattled through the count. One shell left in the Philips gun, six in the Nemex. “Leave your hands right there, and sit the rest of you down. You twitch a finger and I’ll take it off at the wrist.”
He sank back into his seat, face working. Peripheral scan told me there was no one else moving in the room. I stepped carefully over Deek, who had rolled into a foetal ball around the damage in his gut and was giving out a deep, agonised wailing. Keeping the Nemex focused on the table in front of Jerry’s groin, I dropped my other arm until the Philips gun was pointing straight down and pulled the trigger. The noise from Deek stopped.
At this, Jerry erupted.
“Are you f*cking crazy, Ryker? Stop it! You can’t—”
I jerked the Nemex barrel at him and either that or something in my face shut him up. Nothing stirred behind the curtains at the end of the runway, nothing behind the bar. The doors stayed closed. Crossing the remaining distance to Jerry’s table, I kicked one of the chairs around backwards and then straddled it, facing him.
“You, Jerry,” I said evenly, “need to listen to people occasionally. I’ve told you, my name is not Ryker.”
“Whoever the f*ck you are, I’m connected.” There was so much venom on the face before me it was a wonder Jerry didn’t choke on it. “I’m jacked into the f*cking machine, you get me? This. All this. You’re going to f*cking pay. You’re going to wish—”
“I’d never met you,” I finished for him. I stowed the empty Philips gun back in its Fibregrip holster. “Jerry, I already wish I’d never met you. Your sophisticated friends were sophisticated enough for that. But I notice they didn’t tell you I was back on the street. Not so tight with Ray these days, is that it?”
I was watching his face, and the name didn’t register. Either he was very cool under fire, or he genuinely wasn’t fishing in the senior fleet. I tried again.
“Trepp’s dead,” I said casually. His eyes moved, just a fraction. “Trepp, and a few others. Want to know why you’re still alive?”
His mouth tightened, but he said nothing. I leaned over the table and pushed the barrel of the Nemex up against his left eye.
“I asked you a question.”
“F*ck you.”
I nodded and settled back onto my seat. “Hard man, huh? So I’ll tell you. I need some answers, Jerry. You can start by telling me what happened to Elizabeth Elliott. That should be easy, I figure you carved her up yourself. Then I want to know who Elias Ryker is, who Trepp works for, and where the clinic is that you sent me to.”
“F*ck you.”
“You don’t think I’m serious? Or are you just hoping the cops are going to show up and save your stack?” I fished the commandeered blaster out of my pocket left-handed and drew a careful bead on the dead security guard on the runway. The range was short and the beam torched his head off in a single explosion. The stench of charred flesh rolled across the room to us. Keeping one eye on Jerry, I played the beam around a little until I was sure I’d destroyed everything from the shoulders up, then snapped the weapon off and lowered it. Jerry stared at me over the table.
“You piece of shit, he only worked security for me!”
“That’s just become a proscribed profession, as far as I’m concerned. Deek and the rest are going the same way. And so are you, unless you tell me what I want to know.” I lifted the beam weapon. ”One chance.”
“All right.” The crack was audible in his voice. “All right, all right. Elliott tried to put a lock on a customer, she got some big name Meth come slumming down here, reckoned she’d got enough shit to twist him. Stupid cunt tried to make me a partnership deal, she figured I could lean on this Meth guy. No f*cking clue what she was dealing with.”
“No.” I looked stonily at him across the table. “I guess not.”
He caught the look. “Hey, man, I know what you’re thinking, but it ain’t like that. I tried to warn her off, so she went direct. Direct to a f*cking Meth. You think I wanted this place ripped down and me buried under it. I had to deal with her, man. Had to.”
“You iced her?”
He shook his head. “I made a call,” he said in a subdued voice. “That’s how it works around here.”
“Who’s Ryker?”
“Ryker’s a—,” he swallowed. “—a cop. Used to work Sleeve Theft, then they upped him to the Organic Damage Division. He was f*cking that Sia cunt, the one came out here the night you crocked Oktai.”
“Ortega?”
“Yeah, Ortega. Everybody knew it, they say that’s how he got the transfer. That’s why we figured you were—he was—back on the street. When Deck saw you talking to Ortega we figured she’d accessed someone, done a deal.”
“Back on the street? Back from where?”
“Ryker was dirty, man.” Now the flow had started, it was coming in full flood. “He RD’d a couple of sleevedealers, up in Seattle—”
“RD?”
“Yeah, RD’d.” Jerry looked momentarily nonplussed, as if I’d just queried the colour of the sky.
“I’m not from here,” I said patiently.
“RD. Real Death. He pulped them, man. Couple of other guys went down stack intact so Ryker paid off some Dipper to register the lot of them Catholic. Either the input didn’t take, or someone at OrgDam found out. He got the double barrel. Two hundred years, no remission. Word is, Ortega headed up the squad that took him down.”
Well, well. I waved the Nemex encouragingly.
“That’s it, man. All I got. It’s off the wire. Street talk. Look, Ryker never shook this place down, even back when he worked ST. I run a clean house. I never even met the guy.”
“And Oktai?”
Jerry nodded vigorously. “That’s it, Oktai. Oktai used to run spare part deals out of Oakland. You, I mean, Ryker used to shake him down all the time. Beat him half to death couple of years back.”
“So Oktai comes running to you—”
“That’s it. He’s like, crazy, saying Ryker must be working some scam down here. So we run the cabin tapes, get you talking to—”
Jerry dried up as he saw where we were heading. I gestured again with the gun.
“That’s f*cking it.” There was an edge of desperation in his voice.
“All right.” I sat back a little and patted my pockets for cigarettes, remembered I had none. “You smoke?”
“Smoke? Do I look like a f*cking idiot?”
I sighed. “Never mind. What about Trepp? She looked a little upmarket for your cred. Who’d you borrow her from?”
“Trepp’s an indie. Contract hire for whoever. She does me favours sometimes.”
“Not any more. You ever see her real sleeve?”
“No. Wire says she keeps it on ice in New York most of the time.”
“That far from here?”
“ ‘Bout an hour, suborbital.”
By my reckoning that put her in the same league as Kadmin. Global muscle, maybe Interplanetary too. The Senior Fleet.
‘So who’s the wire say she’s working for now?”
“I don’t know.”
I studied the barrel of the blaster as if it were a Martian relic. “Yeah, you do.” I looked up and offered him a bleak smile. “Trepp’s gone. Unstacked, the works. You don’t need to worry about selling her out. You need to worry about me.”
He stared defiantly at me for a couple of moments, then looked down.
“I heard she was doing stuff for the Houses.”
“Good. Now, tell me about the clinic. Your sophisticated friends.”
The Envoy training should have been keeping my voice even, but maybe I was getting rusty because Jerry heard something there. He moistened his lips.
“Listen, those are dangerous people. You got away, you’d better just leave it at that. You got no idea what they—”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually.” I pointed the blaster into his face. “The clinic.”
“Christ, they’re just people I know. You know, business associates. They can use the spare parts, sometimes, and I—” He changed tack abruptly as he saw my face. “They do stuff for me sometimes. It’s just business.”
I thought of Louise, alias Anenome, and the journey we’d taken together. I felt a muscle beneath my eye twitch, and it was all I could do not to pull the trigger there and then. I dug up my voice, instead, and used it. It sounded more like a machine than the door robot had.
“We’re going for a ride, Jerry. Just you and me, to visit your business associates. And don’t f*ck with me. I’ve already figured out it’s over the other side of the Bay. And I’ve got a good memory for places. You steer me wrong, and I’ll RD you on the spot. Got it?”
From his face I judged that he did.
But just to make sure, on the way out of the club I stopped beside each corpse and burnt its head off down to the shoulders. The burning left an acrid stench that followed us out of the gloom and into the early morning street like a ghost of rage.

There’s a village up on the north arm of the Millsport archipelago where, if a fisherman survives drowning, he is required to swim out to a low reef about half a kilometre from shore, spit into the ocean beyond and return. Sarah’s from there, and once, holed up in a cheap swamp hotel, hiding from heat both physical and figurative, she tried to explain the rationale. It always sounded like macho bullshit to me.
Now, marching down the sterile white corridors of the clinic once again, with the muzzle of my own Philips gun screwed into my neck, I began to have some understanding of the strength it must take to wade back into that water. I’d had cold shivers since we went down in the lift: for the second time, Jerry holding the gun on me from behind. After Innenin, I’d more or less forgotten what it was like to be genuinely afraid, but virtualities were a notable exception. There, you had no control, and literally anything could happen.
Again and again.
They were rattled at the clinic. The news of Trepp’s barbecue ride must have reached them by now, and the face that Jerry had spoken to on the screen at the discreetly appointed front door had gone death white at the sight of me.
“We thought—”
“Never mind that,” snapped Jerry. “Open the f*cking door. We’ve got to get this piece of shit off the street.”
The clinic was part of an old turn-of-the-millennium block that someone had renovated in neo-industrial style, doors painted with heavy black and yellow chevrons, fa?ades draped in scaffolding and balconies hung with fake cabling and hoists. The door before us divided along the upward points of the chevrons and slid noiselessly apart. With a last glance at the early morning street, Jerry thrust me inside.
The entrance hall was also neoind, more scaffolding along the walls and patches of exposed brickwork. A pair of security guards were waiting at the end. One of them put out a hand as we approached, and Jerry swung on him, snarling.
“I don’t need any f*cking help. You’re the wipeouts that let this motherf*cker go in the first place.”
The two guards exchanged a glance and the extended grasp turned into a placatory gesture. They conveyed us to an elevator door that proved to be the same commercial-capacity shaft I’d ridden down from the car park on the roof last time. When we came out at the bottom, the same medical team were waiting, sedating implements poised. They looked edgy, tired. Butt end of the night shift. When the same nurse moved to hypo me, Jerry brought out the snarl again. He had it down to perfection.
“Never f*cking mind that.” He screwed the Philips gun harder into my neck. “He isn’t going anywhere. I want to see Miller.”
“He’s in surgery.”
“Surgery?” Jerry barked a laugh. “You mean he’s watching the machine make pick and mix. All right, Chung, then.”
The team hesitated.
“What? Don’t tell me you got all your consultants working for a living this morning.”
“No, it’s…” The man nearest me gestured. ”It’s not procedure, taking him in awake.”
“Don’t f*cking tell me about procedure.” Jerry did a good impression of a man about to explode with fury. “Was it procedure to let this piece of shit get out and wreck my place after I sent him over here? Was that f*cking procedure? Was it?”
There was silence. I looked at the blaster and Nemex, shoved into Jerry’s waistband, and measured the angles. Jerry took a renewed grip on my collar and ground the gun under my jaw once again. He glared at the medics and spoke with a kind of gritted calm.
“He ain’t moving. Got it? There isn’t time for this bullshit. We are going to see Chung. Now, move.”
They bought it. Anyone would have. You pile on the pressure, and most people fall back on response. They give in to the higher authority, or the man with the gun. These people were tired and scared. We double-timed it down the corridors. Past the operating theatre I had woken up in, or one like it. I caught a glimpse of figures gathered around the surgery platform, the autosurgeon moving spiderlike above them. We were a dozen paces further along when someone stepped into the corridor behind us.
“Just a moment.” The voice was cultured, almost leisurely, but it brought the medics and Jerry up short. We turned to face a tall, blue-smocked figure wearing bloodstained spray-on surgical gloves and a mask which he now unpinned with one fastidious thumb and forefinger. The visage beneath was blandly handsome, blue eyes in a tanned, square-jawed face, this year’s Competent Male, courtesy of some upmarket cosmetic salon.
“Miller,” said Jerry.
“What exactly is going on here? Courault,” the tall man turned to the female medic, “you know better than to bring subjects through here unsedated.”
“Yes, sir. Mr.Sedaka insisted that there was no risk involved. He said he was in a hurry. To see director Chung.”
“I don’t care how much of a hurry he’s in.” Miller swung on Jerry, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Are you insane, Sedaka? What do you think this is, the visitors’ gallery? I’ve got clients in there. Recognisable faces. Courault, sedate this man immediately.”
Oh, well. No one’s lucky for ever.
I was already moving. Before Courault could lift the hypospray from her hip sack, I yanked both the Nemex and the blaster from Jerry’s waistband and spun, firing. Courault and her two colleagues went down, multiply injured. Blood splattered on antiseptic white behind them. Miller had time for one outraged yell and then I shot him in the mouth with the Nemex. Jerry was just backing away from me, the unloaded Philips gun still dangling from his hand. I threw up the blaster.
“Look, I did my f*cking best, I—”
The beam cut loose and his head exploded.
In the sudden quiet that followed, I retraced my steps to the doors of the surgery and pushed through them. The little knot of figures, immaculately suited to a man and woman, had left the table on which a young female sleeve was laid out, and were gaping at me behind forgotten surgical masks. Only the autosurgeon continued working unperturbed, making smooth incisions and cauterising wounds with abrupt little sizzlings. Indistinct lumps of raw red poked out of an array of small metal dishes collected at the subject’s head. It looked unnervingly like the start of some arcane banquet.
The woman on the table was Louise.
There were five men and women in the theatre, and I killed them all while they stared at me. Then I shot the autosurgeon to pieces with the blaster, and raked the beam over the rest of the equipment in the room. Alarms sirened into life from every wall. In the storm of their combined shrieking, I went round and inflicted Real Death on everyone there.
Outside, there were more alarms and two of the medical crew were still alive. Courault had succeeded in crawling a dozen metres down the corridor in a broad trail of her own blood, and one of her male colleagues, too weak to escape, was trying to prop himself up against the wall. The floor was slippery under him and he kept sliding back down. I ignored him and went after the woman. She stopped when she heard my footsteps, twisted her head to look round and then began to crawl again, frantically. I stamped a foot down between her shoulders to make her stop and then kicked her onto her back.
We looked at each other for a long moment while I remembered her impassive face as she had put me under the night before. I lifted the blaster for her to see.
“Real Death,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
I walked back to the remaining medic who had seen and was now scrabbling desperately backwards away from me. I crouched down in front of him. The screaming of the alarms rose and fell over our heads like lost souls.
“Jesus Christ,” he moaned as I pointed the blaster at his face. “Jesus Christ, I only work here.”
“Good enough,” I told him.
The blaster was almost inaudible against the alarms.
Working rapidly, I took care of the third medic in similar fashion, dealt with Miller a little more at length, stripped Jerry’s headless corpse of its jacket and tacked the garment under my arm. Then I scooped up the Philips gun, tacked it into my waistband and left. On my way out along the screaming corridors of the clinic, I killed every person that I met, and melted their stacks to slag.
Personal.
The police were landing on the roof as I let myself out of the front door and walked unhurriedly down the street. Under my arm, Miller’s severed head was beginning to seep blood through the lining of Jerry’s jacket.