Altered Carbon

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
Wherever it was in Europe that we landed, the weather was better. We left the blunt, windowless sub-orbital sitting on the fused glass runway, and walked to the terminal building through glinting sunlight that was a physical pressure on my body, even through my jacket. The sky above was an uncompromising blue from horizon to horizon, and the air felt hard and dry. According to the pilot’s time-check, it was still only mid afternoon. I shrugged my way out of the jacket.
“Should be a limo waiting for us,” Trepp said over her shoulder.
We passed, without formality, into the terminal and across a zone of micro-climate where palms and other less recognisable tropicalia made a bid for the massive glass ceiling. A misty rain drifted down from sprinkler systems, rendering the air pleasantly damp after the aridity outside. Along the aisles set between the trees, children played and squalled, and old people sat dozily on wrought iron benches in a seemingly impossible co-existence. The middle generations were gathered in knots at coffee stands, talking with more gesticulation than I’d seen in Bay City and seemingly oblivious to the factors of time and schedule that govern most terminal buildings.
I adjusted the jacket across my shoulder to cover my weapons as much as possible and followed Trepp into the trees. It wasn’t quick enough to beat the gaze of two security guards standing under a palm nearby, or that of a little girl scuffing her toes along the side of the aisle towards us. Trepp made a sign to the security as they stiffened, and they fell back into their previous relaxed postures with nods. Clearly, we were expected. The little girl wasn’t so easily bought—she stared up at me with wide eyes until I made a pistol out of my fingers and shot her with noisy sound effects. Then she showed her teeth in a huge grin and hid behind the nearest bench. I heard her shooting me in the back all the way along the aisle.
Outside again, Trepp steered me past a mob of taxis to where an anonymous black cruiser was idling in a no-waiting zone. We climbed into air-conditioned cool and pale grey automould seating.
“Ten minutes,” she promised, as we rose into the air. “What did you think of the micro-climate?”
“Very nice.”
“Got them all over the airport. Weekends, people come out from the centre to spend the day here. Weird, huh?”
I grunted and watched the window as we banked over the whorled settlement patterns of a major city. Further out, a dusty-looking plain stretched to the horizon and the almost painful blue of the sky. To the left, I could make out the rise of mountains.
Trepp seemed to pick up on my disinclination to talk and she busied herself with a phone jack that she plugged in behind the ear with the ironic pendant. Another internal chip. Her eyes closed as she began the call, and I was left with the peculiar feeling of aloneness that you get when someone’s using one of those things.
Alone was fine with me.
The truth was that I’d been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the journey. In the cabin of the sub-ship I’d been steadfastly withdrawn despite Trepp’s obvious interest in my background. Finally she gave up trying to extract anecdotes about Harlan’s World and the Corps and tried instead to teach me a couple of card games she knew. Impelled by some ghost of cultural politeness, I reciprocated, but two isn’t an ideal number for cards and neither of our hearts was in it. We landed in Europe in silence, each flipping through our own selection from the jet’s media stack. Despite Trepp’s apparent lack of concern on the subject, I was having a hard time forgetting the circumstances of our last trip together.
Below us, the plain gave way to increasingly green uplands and then one valley in particular where the forested crags seemed to close around something man-made. As we started to descend, Trepp unjacked herself with a flutter of eyelids that meant she hadn’t bothered to disconnect the chip synapses first—strictly advised against by most manufacturers, but maybe she was showing off. I barely noticed. Most of me was absorbed in the thing we were landing beside.
It was a massive stone cross, larger than any I’d seen before and weather-stained with age. As the cruiser spiralled down towards its base and then beyond, I realised that whoever had built the monument had set it on a huge central buttress of rock so it gave the impression of a titanic broadsword sunk into the earth by some retired warrior god. It was entirely in keeping with the dimensions of the mountains around it, as if no human agency could possibly have put it there. The stepped terraces of stone and ancillary buildings below the buttress, themselves monumental in size, shrank almost to insignificance under the brooding presence of this single artefact.
Trepp was watching me with a glitter in her eyes.
The limo settled on one of the stone expanses and I climbed out, blinking up through the sun at the cross.
“This belong to the Catholics?” I hazarded.
“Used to.” Trepp started towards a set of towering steel doors in the rock ahead. “Back when it was new. It’s private property now.”
“How come?”
“Ask Ray.” Now it was Trepp who seemed uninterested in conversation. It was almost as if something in the vast structure was calling a different part of her character into ascendancy. She drifted to the doors as if attracted there by magnetism.
As we reached the portals, they yawned slowly open with a dull hum of powered hinges and stopped with an aperture of two metres between them. I gestured at Trepp, and she stepped over the threshold with a shrug. Something big moved spiderlike down the walls in the dimness to either side of the entrance. I slipped a hand to the butt of the Nemex, knowing as I did that it was futile. We were in the land of the giants now.
Skeletal gun barrels the length of a man’s body emerged from the gloom as the two robot sentry systems sniffed us over. I judged the calibre as about the same as the Hendrix’s lobby defence system, and relinquished my weapons. With a vaguely insectile chittering, the automated killing units drew back and spidered up the walls to their roosting points. At the base of the two alcoves they lived in, I could make out massive iron angels with swords.
“Come on.” Trepp’s voice was unnaturally loud in the cathedral hush. “You think if we wanted to kill you, we would have brought you all the way here?”
I followed her down a flight of stone steps and into the main body of the chamber. We were in a huge basilica that must run the length of the rock buttress beneath the cross and whose ceiling was lost in gloom high above us. Up ahead was another set of steps, leading onto a raised and slightly narrower section where the lighting was stronger. As we reached it, I saw that the roof here was vaulted over the stone statues of hooded guardians, their hands resting on thick broadswords and their lips curled into faintly contemptuous smiles below their hoods.
I felt my own lips twist in fractional response, and my thoughts were all of high yield explosives.
At the end of the basilica, grey things were hanging in the air. For a moment I thought I was looking at a series of shaped monoliths embedded in a permanent force field, and then one of the grey things shifted slightly in a stray current of the chilly air, and I suddenly knew what they were.
“Are you impressed, Takeshi-san?”
The voice, the elegant Japanese in which I was addressed, hit me like cyanide. My breathing locked up momentarily with the force of my emotions and I felt a jagged current go though the neurachem system as it responded. I allowed myself to turn towards the voice, slowly. Somewhere under my eye, a muscle twitched with the suppressed will to do violence.
“Ray,” I said, in Amanglic. “I should have f*cking seen this one on the launch pad.”
Reileen Kawahara stepped from a doorway to one side of the circular chamber where the basilica ended and made an ironic bow. She followed me into Amanglic flawlessly.
“Perhaps you should have seen it coming, yes,” she mused. ”But if there’s a single thing that I like about you, Kovacs, it is your endless capacity to be surprised. For all your war veteran posturing, you remain at core an innocent. And in these times that is no mean achievement. How do you do it?”
“Trade secret. You’d have to be a human being to understand it.”
The insult fell unregarded. Kawahara looked down at the marbled floor as if she could see it lying there.
“Yes, well, I believe we’ve been over this ground before.”
My mind fled back to New Beijing and the cancerous power structures that Kawahara’s interests had created there, the discordant screams of the tortured that I had come to associate with her name.
I stepped closer to one of the grey envelopes and slapped it. The coarse surface gave under my hand and the thing swung a little on its cables. Something shifted sluggishly within.
“Bullet-proof, right?”
“Mmm.” Kawahara tipped her head to one side. “Depends on the bullet, I would say. But impact resistant, certainly.”
I manufactured a laugh from somewhere. “Bullet-proof womb lining! Only you, Kawahara. Only you would need to bullet-proof your clones, and then bury them under a mountain.”
She stepped forward into the light then, and the force of my hate came up and hit me in the pit of the stomach as I looked at her. Reileen Kawahara claimed upbringing among the contaminated slums of Fission City, Western Australia, but if it was true, she had long ago left behind any trace of her origins. The figure opposite me had the poise of a dancer, a balance of body that was subtly attractive without calling forth any immediate hormonal response, and the face above was elfin and intelligent. It was the sleeve she had worn on New Beijing, custom cultured and untouched by implants of any kind. Pure organism, elevated to the level of art. Kawahara had garbed it in black, stiff tulip-petalled skirts cupping her lower body to mid-calf and a soft silk blouse settling over her torso like dark water. The shoes on her feet were modelled on spacedeck slippers but with a modest heel, and her auburn hair was short and winged back from the clean-boned face. She looked like the inhabitant of a screen ad for some slightly sexy investment fund.
“Power is habitually buried,” she said. “Think of the Protectorate bunkers on Harlan’s World. Or the caverns the Envoy Corps hid you in while you were made over in their image. The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?”
“Judging by the way I’ve been led around the last week, I’d say yes. Now do you want to get on with this pitch?”
“Very well.” Kawahara glanced aside at Trepp, who wandered away into the gloom, neck craned up at the ceiling like a tourist. I looked around for a seat and found none. “You are aware, no doubt, that I recommended you to Laurens Bancroft.”
“He mentioned it.”
“Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have. We could have had this conversation a week ago, and saved everyone a lot of unnecessary pain. It was not my intention for Kadmin to harm you. His instructions were to bring you here alive.”
“There’s been a change of programme,” I said, walking along the curve of the end chamber. “Kadmin’s not following his instructions. He tried to kill me this morning.”
Kawahara made a gesture of irritation. “I know that. That’s why you’ve been brought here.”
“Did you spring him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“He was going to roll over on you?”
“He told Keith Rutherford that he felt he was not deployed to his best advantage in holding. That it would be hard to honour his contract with me in such a position.”
“Subtle.”
“Wasn’t it. I never can resist sophisticated negotiation. I feel he earnt the re-investment.”
“So you beaconed in on me, hooked him out and beamed him over to Carnage for re-sleeving, right?” I felt in my pockets and found Ortega’s cigarettes. In the grim twilight of the basilica, the familiar packet was like a postcard from another place. “No wonder the Panama Rose didn’t have his second fighter decanted when we got there. He’d probably only just finished sleeving Kadmin. That motherf*cker walked out of there in a Right Hand of God martyr.”
“About the same time you were coming aboard,” agreed Kawahara. ”In fact, I understand he was posing as a menial and you walked right past him. I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here.”
“Kawahara, I’d rather you died of an internal haemorrhage, but I don’t suppose you’ll oblige me.” I touched my cigarette to the ignition patch and drew it to life, remembering. The man knelt in the ring. I played it back slowly. On the deck of the fightdrome ship, peering down at the design being painted onto the killing floor. The upturned face as we passed. Yes, he’d even smiled. I grimaced at the memory.
“You’re being a lot less courteous than befits a man in your situation.” I thought that, underneath the cool, I could detect a ragged edge in her voice. Despite her much vaunted self-control, Reileen Kawahara wasn’t much better at coping with disrespect than Bancroft, General Maclntyre or any other creature of power I’d had dealings with. “Your life is in danger and I am in a position to safeguard it.”
“My life’s been in danger before,” I told her. “Usually as a result of some piece of shit like you making large-scale decisions about how reality ought to be run. You’ve already let Kadmin get too close for my comfort. In fact, he probably used your f*cking virtual locater to do it.”
“I sent him,” Kawahara gritted, “to collect you. Again he disobeyed me.”
“Didn’t he just.” I rubbed reflexively at the bruise on my shoulder. “So why should I believe you can do any better next time?”
“Because you know I can.” Kawahara came across the centre of the chamber, ducking her head to avoid the leathery grey clone sacs, and intercepting my path around the perimeter. Her face was taut with anger. “I am one of the seven most powerful human beings in this solar system. I have access to powers that the UN Field Commander General would kill for.”
“This architecture’s going to your head, Reileen. You wouldn’t even have found me if you hadn’t been keeping tabs on Sullivan. How the f*ck are you going to find Kadmin?”
“Kovacs, Kovacs.” There was a definite trembling in her laugh, as if she was fighting an urge to put her thumbs through my eye sockets. “Do you have any idea what happens on the streets of any given city on Earth, if I put out a search on someone? Do you have any idea how easy it would be to snuff you out here and now?”
I drew deliberately on the cigarette and plumed the smoke out at her. “As your faithful retainer Trepp said, not ten minutes ago, why bring me here just to snuff me out? You want something from me. Now what is it?”
She breathed in through her nose, hard. A measure of calm seeped onto her face and she stepped back a couple of paces, turned away from the confrontation.
“You’re right, Kovacs. I want you alive. If you disappear now, Bancroft’s going to get the wrong message.”
“Or the right message.” I scuffed absently at engraved lettering on the stone beneath my feet. “Did you torch him?”
“No.” Kawahara looked almost amused. “He killed himself.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Whether you believe it or not is immaterial to me, Kovacs. What I want from you is an end to the investigation. A tidy end.”
“And how do you suggest I achieve that?”
“I don’t care. Make something up. You’re an Envoy, after all. Convince him. Tell him you think the police verdict was correct. Produce a culprit, if you must.” A thin smile. “I do not include myself in that category.”
“If you didn’t kill him, if he torched his own head off, why should you care what happens? What’s your interest in this?”
“That isn’t under discussion here.”
I nodded slowly. “And what do I get in return for this tidy ending?”
“Apart from the hundred thousand dollars?” Kawahara tilted her head quizzically. “Well, I understand you’ve been made a very generous recreational offer by other parties. And for my part, I will keep Kadmin off your back by whatever means necessary.”
I looked down at the lettering beneath my feet, and thought it through, link by link.
“Francisco Franco,” said Kawahara, mistaking the direction of my gaze for focused interest. “Petty tyrant a long time back. He built this place.”
“Trepp said it belonged to the Catholics.”
Kawahara shrugged. “Petty tyrant with delusions of religion. Catholics get on well with tyranny. It’s in the culture.”
I glanced around, ostensibly casual, scanning for robot security systems. “Yeah, looks like it. So let me get this straight. You want me to sell Bancroft a parabolic full of shit, in return for which you’ll call off Kadmin, who you set on me in the first place. That’s the deal?”
“That, as you put it, is the deal.”
I took one last lungful of smoke, savoured it and exhaled.
“You can go f*ck yourself, Kawahara.” I dropped my cigarette on the engraved stonework and ground it out with my heel. “I’ll take my chances with Kadmin, and let Bancroft know you probably had him killed. So. Change your mind about letting me live now?”
My hands hung open at my sides, twitching to be filled with the rough woven bulk of handgun butts. I was going to put three Nemex shells through Kawahara’s throat, at stack height, then put the gun in my mouth and blow my own stack apart. Kawahara almost certainly had remote storage anyway, but f*ck it, you’ve got to make a stand somewhere. And a man can only stave off his own death wish for so long.
It could have been worse. It could have been Innenin.
Kawahara shook her head regretfully. She was smiling. “Always the same Kovacs. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Romantic nihilism. Haven’t you learnt anything since New Beijing?”
“There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”
“Oh, that’s Quell, isn’t it? Mine was Shakespeare, but then I don’t expect colonial culture goes back that far, does it?” She was still smiling, poised like a total body theatre gymnast about to launch into her aria. For a moment I suffered the almost hallucinatory conviction that she was going to break into a little dance, choreographed to a junk rhythm beat from speakers hidden in the dome above us.
“Takeshi, where did you get this belief that everything can be resolved with such brute simplicity? Surely not from the Envoys? Was it the Newpest gangs? The thrashings your father gave you as a child? Did you really think I would allow you to force my hand? Did you really think I would have come to the table this empty-handed? Think about it. You know me. Did you really believe it would be this easy?”
The neurachem seethed within me. I bit it back, hung from the moment like a parachutist braced in the jump hatch.
“All right,” I said evenly. “Impress me.”
“Gladly.” Kawahara reached into the breast pocket of her liquid black blouse. She produced a tiny holofile and flicked it into active with a thumbnail. As the images evolved in the air above the unit, she passed it to me. “A lot of the detail is legalistic, but you will of course recognise the salient points.”
I took the little sphere of light as if it were a poisonous flower. The name hit me at once, leaping out of the print —
—Sarah Sachilowska —
—and then the contract terminology, like a building coming down on me in slow motion.
—released into private storage —
—provision for virtual custody —
—unlimited period —
—subject to review at UN discretion —
— under vested authority of the Bay City justice facility —
The knowledge coursed sickly through me. I should have killed Sullivan when I had the chance.
“Ten days.” Kawahara was watching my reactions closely. “That’s how long you have to convince Bancroft the investigation is over, and to walk away. After that, Sachilowska goes into virtual at one of my clinics. There’s a whole new generation of virtual interrogation software out there, and I will personally see to it that she pioneers the lot.”
The holofile hit the marble floor with a brittle crack. I lurched at Kawahara, lips peeling back from my teeth. There was a low growling coming up through my throat that had nothing to do with any combat training I had ever undergone and my hands crooked into talons. I knew what her blood was going to taste like.
The cold barrel of a gun touched down on my neck before I got halfway.
“I’d advise against that,” said Trepp in my ear.
Kawahara came and stood closer to me. “Bancroft isn’t the only one that can buy troublesome criminals off colonial stacks. The Kanagawa justice facility were overjoyed when I came to them two days later with a bid for Sachilowska. The way they see it, if you’re freighted offworld, the chances of you ever having enough money to buy a needlecast back again are pretty slim. And of course they get paid for the privilege of waving you goodbye. It must seem too good to be true. I imagine they’re hoping it’s the start of a trend.” She fingered the lapel of my jacket thoughtfully. “And in fact the way the virtuals market is at the moment, it might be a trend worth starting.”
The muscle under my eye jumped violently.
“I’ll kill you,” I whispered. “I’ll rip your f*cking heart out and eat it. I’ll bring this place down around you—”
Kawahara leaned in until our faces were almost touching. Her breath smelt faintly of mint and oregano. “No, you won’t,” she said. “You’ll do exactly as I say, and you’ll do it within ten days. Because if you don’t, your friend Sachilowska will be starting her own private tour of hell without redemption.”
She stepped back and lifted her hands. “Kovacs, you should be thanking whatever deities they’ve got on Harlan’s World that I’m not some kind of sadist. I mean, I’ve given you an either/or. We could just as easily be negotiating exactly how much agony I put Sachilowska through. I mean, I could start now. That would give you an incentive to wrap things up speedily, wouldn’t it? Ten days in most virtuals adds up to about three or four years. You were in the Wei Clinic; do you think she could stand three years of that? I think she’d probably go insane, don’t you?”
The effort it cost me to contain my hate was like a rupture down behind my eyeballs and into my chest. I forced the words out.
“Terms. How do I know you’ll release her?”
“Because I give you my word.” Kawahara let her arms fall to her sides. “I believe you’ve had some experience of its validity in the past.”
I nodded slowly.
“Subsequent to Bancroft’s acceptance that the case is closed, and your own disappearance from view, I will freight Sachilowska back to Harlan’s World to complete her sentence.” Kawahara bent to pick up the holofile I’d dropped and held it up. She tipped it deftly a couple of times to flick through the pages. “I think you can see here that there is a reversal clause written into the contract. I will of course forfeit a large proportion of the original fee paid, but under the circumstances I’m prepared to do that.” She smiled faintly. “But please bear in mind that a reversal can work in both directions. What I return, I can always buy again. So if you were considering skulking in the undergrowth for a while and then running back to Bancroft, please abandon the idea now. This is a hand that you cannot win.”
The gun barrel lifted away from my neck and Trepp stepped back. The neurachem held me upright like a paraplegic’s mobility suit. I stared numbly at Kawahara.
“Why the f*ck did you do all this?” I whispered. “Why involve me at all, if you didn’t want Bancroft to find his answers?”
“Because you are an Envoy, Kovacs.” Kawahara spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. “Because if anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you. And because I knew you well enough to predict your moves. I arranged to have you brought to me almost as soon as you arrived, but the hotel intervened. And then when chance brought you to the Wei Clinic I endeavoured to bring you here once again.”
“I bluffed my way out of the Wei Clinic.”
“Oh, yes. Your biopirate story. You really think you sold them that second-rate experia rubbish? Be reasonable, Kovacs. You might have backed them up a couple of steps while they thought about it, but the reason, the only reason you got out of the Wei Clinic intact was because I told them to send you that way.” She shrugged. “But then you insisted upon escaping. It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.”
“All right.” I noted vaguely that I was trembling. “I’ll do it.”
“Yes. Of course you will.”
I searched for something else to say, but it felt as if I had been clinically drained of the potential for resistance. The cold of the basilica seemed to be creeping into my bones. I mastered the trembling with an effort and turned to go. Trepp moved silently forward to join me. We had gone about a dozen steps when Kawahara called out behind me.
“Oh, Kovacs…”
I turned as if in a dream. She was smiling.
“If you do manage to wrap it up cleanly, and very quickly, I might consider some kind of cash incentive. A bonus, so to speak. Negotiable. Trepp will give you a contact number.”
I turned away again, numb to a degree I hadn’t felt since the smoking ruins of Innenin. Vaguely, I felt Trepp clap me on the shoulder.
“Come on,” she said companionably. “Let’s get out of here.”
I followed her out under the soul-bruising architecture, beneath the sneering smiles of the hooded guardians, and I knew that from among her grey-wombed clones, Kawahara was watching me all the way with a similar smile. It seemed to take forever to leave the hall and when the huge steel portals cracked open to reveal the outside world, the light that spilled inward was an infusion of life that I grabbed at like a drowning man. All at once, the basilica was a vertical, a cold depth of ocean out of which I was reaching for the sun on the rippled surface. As we left the shadows, my body sucked up the warmth on offer as if it were a solid sustenance. Very gradually, the shivering began to leave me.
But as I walked away, beneath the brooding power of the cross, I could still feel the presence of the place like a cold hand on the nape of my neck.