Altered Carbon

Chapter THIRTY-NINE
Ortega had a variety of news.
Irene Elliott had called in a location and said she was willing to talk about another run. The call had come in on one of the tightest needlecasts Fell Street had ever seen and Elliott said she would only deal directly with me.
Meanwhile, the Panama Rose patch-up was holding water, and Ortega still had the Hendrix memory tapes. Kadmin’s death had rendered Fell Street’s original case pretty much an administrative formality, and no one was in any hurry to tackle it any more. An Internal Affairs inquiry into how exactly the assassin had been pulled out of holding in the first place was just getting started. In view of the assumed AI involvement, the Hendrix would come under scrutiny at some point, but it wasn’t in the pipeline yet. There were some interdepartmental procedures to be gone through and Ortega had sold Murawa a story about loose ends. The Fell Street captain gave her a couple of weeks open-ended, to tidy up; the tacit assumption was that Ortega had no liking for Internal Affairs and wasn’t going to make life easy for them.
A couple of IA detectives were sniffing around the Panama Rose, but Organic Damage had closed ranks around Ortega and Bautista like a stack shutdown. IA were getting nothing so far.
We had a couple of weeks.

Ortega flew north-east. Elliott’s instructions vectored us in on a small huddle of bubblefabs clustered around the western end of a tree-fringed lake hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. Ortega grunted in recognition as we banked above the encampment.
“You know this place?”
“Places like it. Grifter town. See that dish in the centre? They’ve got it webbed into some old geosynch weather platform, gives them free access to anything in the hemisphere. This place probably accounts for a single figure percentage of all the data crime on the West Coast.”
“They never get busted?”
“Depends.” Ortega put the cruiser down on the lake shore a short distance from the nearest bubblefabs. “The way it stands, these people keep the old orbitals ticking over. Without them, someone’d have to pay for decommissioning and that’s kind of pricey. So long as the stuff they turn over is small-scale, no one bothers. Transmission Felony Division have got bigger discs to spin, and no one else is interested. You coming?”
I climbed out and we walked along the shoreline to the encampment. From the air, the place had had a certain structural uniformity, but now I could see that the bubblefabs were all painted with brightly coloured pictures or abstract patterns. No two designs were alike, although I could discern the same artistic hand at work in several of the examples we passed. In addition, a lot of the ‘fabs were fitted out with porch canopies, secondary extension bulges and in some cases even more permanent log cabin annexes. Clothing hung on lines between the buildings and small children ran about, getting cheerfully filthy.
Camp security met us inside the first ring of ‘fabs. He stood over two metres tall in flat workboots and probably weighed as much as both my current selves put together. Beneath loose grey coveralls, I could see the stance of a fighter. His eyes were a startling red and short horns sprouted from his temples. Beneath the horns, his face was scarred and old. The effect was startlingly offset by the small child he was cradling in his left arm.
He nodded at me.
“You Anderson?”
“Yes. This is Kristin Ortega.” I was surprised how flat the name suddenly sounded to me. Without Ryker’s pheromonal interface, I was left with little more than a vague appreciation that the woman beside me was very attractive in a lean, self-sufficient way that recalled Virginia Vidaura.
That, and my memories.
I wondered if she was feeling the same.
“Cop, huh?” The ex-freak fighter’s tone was not overflowing with warmth, but it didn’t sound too hostile either.
“Not at the moment,” I said firmly. “Is Irene here?”
“Yeah.” He shifted the child to his other arm and pointed. “The ‘fab with the stars on it. Been expecting you.”
As he spoke, Irene Elliott emerged from the structure in question. The horned man grunted and led us across, picking up a small train of additional children on the way. Elliott watched us approach with her hands in her pockets. Like the ex-fighter, she was dressed in boots and coveralls whose grey was startlingly offset by a violently-coloured rainbow headband.
“Your visitors,” said the horned man. “You OK with this?”
Elliott nodded evenly, and he hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and wandered off with the children in tow. Elliott watched him go, then turned back to us.
“You’d better come inside,” she said.
Inside the bubblefab, the utilitarian space had been sectioned off with wooden partitions and woven rugs hung from wires set in the plastic dome. Walls were covered in more artwork, most of which looked as if it had been contributed by the children of the camp. Elliott took us to a softly lit space set with lounging bags and a battered-looking access terminal on a hinged arm epoxied to the wall of the bubble. She seemed to have adjusted well to the sleeve, and her movements were smoothly unselfconscious. I’d noticed the improvement on board the Panama Rose in the early hours of the morning, but here it was clearer. She lowered herself easily into one of the loungers and looked speculatively up at me.
“That’s you inside there, Anderson, I presume?”
I inclined my head.
“You going to tell me why?”
I seated myself opposite her. “That depends on you, Irene. Are you in or out?”
“You guarantee I get my own body back.” She was trying hard to sound casual, but there was no disguising the hunger in her voice. “That’s the deal?”
I glanced up at Ortega, who nodded. “That’s correct. If this comes off successfully, we’ll be able to requisition it under a federal mandate. But it has to be successful. If we f*ck up, we’ll probably all go down the double barrel.”
“You are operating under a federal brief, lieutenant?”
Ortega smiled tightly. “Not exactly. But under the UN charter, we’ll be able to apply the brief retrospectively. If, as I said, we are successful.”
“A retrospective federal brief.” Elliott looked back to me, brows raised. “That’s about as common as whalemeat. This must be something gigantic.”
“It is,” I said.
Elliott’s eyes narrowed. “And you’re not with JacSol any more, are you? Who the f*ck are you, Anderson?”
“I’m your fairy godmother, Elliott. Because if the lieutenant’s requisition doesn’t work out, I’ll buy your sleeve back. That’s a guarantee. Now are you in, or are you out?”
Irene Elliott hung on to her detachment for a moment longer, a moment in which I felt my technical respect for her take on a more personal tone. Then she nodded.
“Tell me,” she said.
I told her.
It took about half an hour to lay it out, while Ortega stood about or paced restlessly in and out of the bubblefab. I couldn’t blame her. Over the past ten days she’d had to face the breakdown of practically every professional tenet she owned, and she was now committed to a project that, if it went wrong, offered a bristling array of hundred-year or better storage offences for all concerned. I think, without Bautista and the others behind her, she might not have risked it, even with her cordial hatred of the Meths, even for Ryker.
Or maybe I just tell myself that.
Irene Elliott sat and listened in silence broken only by three technical queries to which I had no answers. When I was finished, she said nothing for a long time. Ortega stopped her pacing and came to stand behind me, waiting.
“You’re insane,” said Elliott finally.
“Can you do it?”
She opened her mouth, then shut it again. Her face went dreamy, and I guessed she was reviewing a previous Dipping episode from memory. After a few moments she snapped back and nodded as if she might be trying to convince herself.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “It can be done, but not in real time. This isn’t like rewriting your fightdrome friends’ security system, or even downloading into that AI core. This makes what we did to the AI look like a systems check. To do this, to even attempt this, I’ve got to have a virtual forum.”
“That’s not a problem. Anything else?”
“That depends on what counter-intrusion systems Head in the Clouds is running.” Disgust, and an edge of tears coloured her tone for a couple of instants. “You say this is a high-class whorehouse?”
“Very,” said Ortega.
Elliott’s feelings went back underground. “Then I’ll have to run some checks. That’ll take time.”
“How much time?” Ortega wanted to know.
“Well, I can do it two ways.” Professional scorn surfaced in her voice, scarring over the emotion that had been there before. “I can do a fast scan and maybe ring every alarm aboard this prick in the sky. Or I can do it right, which’ll take a couple of days. Your choice. We’re running on your clock.”
“Take your time,” I suggested, with a warning glance at Ortega. “Now what about wiring me for sight and sound. You know anyone who can do that discreetly?”
“Yeah, we got people here can do that. But you can forget a telemetry system. You try and transmit out of there, you will bring the house down. No pun intended.” She moved to the arm-mounted terminal and punched up a general access screen. “I’ll see if Reese can dig you up a grab-and-stash mike. Shielded microstack, you’ll be able to record a couple of hundred hours high res and we can retrieve it here later.”
“Good enough. This going to be expensive?”
Elliott turned back to us, eyebrows hoisted. “Talk to Reese. She’ll probably have to buy the parts in, but maybe you can get her to do the surgery on a retrospective federal basis. She could use the juice at UN level.”
I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged exasperatedly.
“I guess,” she said ungraciously, as Elliott busied herself with the screen. I stood up and turned to the policewoman.
“Ortega,” I muttered into her ear, abruptly aware that in the new sleeve I was completely unmoved by her scent. “It isn’t my fault we’re short of funds. The JacSol account’s gone, evaporated, and if I start drawing on Bancroft’s credit for stuff like this, it’s going to look f*cking odd. Now get a grip.”
“It isn’t that,” she hissed back.
“Then what is it?”
She looked at me, at our brutally casual proximity. “You know goddamn well what it is.”
I drew a deep breath and closed my eyes to avoid having to meet her gaze. “Did you sort out that hardware for me?”
“Yeah.” She stepped back, voice returning to normal volume and empty of tone. “The stungun from the Fell Street tackle room, no one’ll miss it. The rest is coming out of NYPD confiscated weapon stocks. I’m flying out to pick it up tomorrow personally. Material transaction, no records. I called in a couple of favours.”
“Good. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Her tone was savagely ironic. “Oh, by the way, they had a hell of a time getting hold of the spider venom load. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what that’s all about, would you?”
“It’s a personal thing.”
Elliott got someone on the screen. A serious-looking woman in a late fifties African sleeve.
“Hey, Reese,” she said cheerfully. “Got a customer for you.”

Despite the pessimistic estimate, Irene Elliott finished her preliminary scan a day later. I was down by the lake, recovering from Reese’s simple microsurgery and skimming stones with a girl of about six who seemed to have adopted me. Ortega was still in New York, the chill between us not really resolved.
Elliott emerged from the encampment and yelled out the news of her successful covert scan without bothering to come down to the water’s edge. I winced as the echoes floated out across the water. The open atmosphere of the little settlement took some getting used to, and how it fitted in with successful data piracy I still couldn’t see. I handed my stone to the girl and rubbed reflexively at the tiny soreness under one eye where Reese had gone in and implanted the recording system.
“Here. See if you can do it with this one.”
“Your stones are heavy.” she said plaintively.
“Well, try anyway. I got nine skips out of the last one.” She squinted up at me. “You’re wired for it. I’m only six.”
“True. On both counts.” I placed a hand on her head. “But you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.”
“When I’m big I’m going to be wired like Auntie Reese.”
I felt a small sadness well up on the cleanly swept floor of my Khumalo neurachem brain. “Good for you. Look, I’ve got to go. Don’t go too close to the water, right?”
She looked at me exasperatedly. “I can swim.”
“So can I, but it looks cold, don’t you think?”
“Ye-e-es…”
“There you are then.” I ruffled her hair and set off up the beach. At the first bubblefab I looked back. She was hefting the big flat stone at the lake as if the water were an enemy.
Elliott was in the expansive, post-mission mood that most datarats seem to hit after a long spell cruising the stacks.
“I’ve been doing a little historical digging,” she said, swinging the terminal arm outward from its resting place. Her hands danced across the terminal deck and the screen flared into life, shedding colours on her face. “How’s the implant?”
I touched my lower eyelid again. “Fine. Tapped straight into the same system that runs the timechip. Reese could have made a living doing this.”
“She used to,” said Elliott shortly. “Till they busted her for anti-Protectorate literature. When this is all over, you make sure that someone puts in a word for her at federal level, because she sure as shit needs it.”
“Yeah, she said.” I peered over her shoulder at the screen. “What have you got there?”
“Head in the Clouds. Tampa aeroyard blueprints. Hull specs, the works. This stuff is centuries old. I’m amazed they still keep it on stack at all. Anyway, seems she was originally commissioned as part of the Caribbean storm management flotilla, back before SkySystems orbital weather net put them all out of business. A lot of the long-range scanning equipment got ripped out when they refitted, but they left the local sensors in and that’s what provides basic skin security. Temperature pick-ups, infrared, that sort of thing. Anything with body heat lands anywhere on the hull, they’ll know it’s there.”
I nodded, unsurprised. “Ways in?”
She shrugged. “Hundreds. Ventilation ducts, maintenance crawlways. Take your pick.”
“I’ll need to have another look at what Miller told my construct. But assume I’m going in from the top. Body heat’s the only real problem?”
“Yeah, but those sensors are looking for anything over a square millimetre of temperature differential. A stealth suit won’t cover you. Christ, even the breath coming out of your lungs will probably trip them. And it doesn’t stop there.” Elliott nodded sombrely at the screen. “They must have liked the system a lot, because when they refitted they ran it through the whole ship. Room temperature monitors on every corridor and walkway.”
“Yeah, Miller said something about a heat signature tag.”
“That’s it. Incoming guests get it on boarding and their codes are incorporated into the system. Anyone else walks down a corridor uninvited, or goes somewhere their tag says they can’t, they set off every alarm in the hull. Simple, and very effective. And I don’t think I can cut in there and write you a welcome code. Too much security.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”

“You what?” Ortega looked at me with fury and disbelief spreading across her face like a storm front. She stood away from me as if I might be contagious.
“It was just a suggestion. If you don’t—”
“No.” She said the word as if it was new to her and she liked the taste. “No. No f*cking way. I’ve connived at viral crime for you, I’ve hidden evidence for you, I’ve assisted you in multiple sleeving—”
“Hardly multiple.”
“It’s a f*cking crime,” she said through her teeth. “I am not going to steal confiscated drugs out of police holding for you.”
“OK, forget it.” I hesitated, put my tongue in my cheek for a moment. “Want to help me confiscate some more, then?”
Something inside me cheered as the unwilling smile broke cover on her face.

The dealer was in the same place he had been when I walked into his ‘cast radius two weeks ago. This time I saw him twenty metres away, skulking in an alcove with the bat-eyed broadcast unit on his shoulder like a familiar. There were very few people on the street in any direction. I nodded to Ortega who was stationed across the street and walked on. The sales ‘cast had not changed, the street of ridiculously ferocious women and the sudden cool of the betathanatine hit, but this time I was expecting it and in any case the Khumalo neurachem had a definite damping effect on the intrusion. I stepped up to the dealer with an eager smile.
“Got Stiff, man.”
“Good, that’s what I’m looking for. How much have you got?”
He started a little, expression coiling between greed and suspicion. His hand slipped down towards the horrorbox at his belt just in case.
“How much you want, man?”
“All of it,” I said cheerfully. “Everything you’ve got.”
He read me, but by then it was too late. I had the lock on two of his fingers as they stabbed at the horrorbox controls.
“Ah-ah.”
He took a swipe at me with the other arm. I broke the fingers. He howled and collapsed around the pain. I lacked him in the stomach and took the horrorbox away from him. Behind me, Ortega arrived and flashed her badge in his sweat-beaded face.
“Bay City police,” she said laconically. “You’re busted. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we.”
The betathanatine was in a series of dermal pads with tiny glass decanters folded in cotton. I held one of the vials up to the light and shook it. The liquid within was a pale red.
“What do you reckon?” I asked Ortega. “About eight per cent?”
“Looks like. Maybe less.” Ortega put a knee into the dealer’s neck, grinding his face into the pavement. “Where do you cut this stuff, pal?”
“This is good merchandise,” the dealer squealed. “I buy direct. This is—”
Ortega rapped hard on his skull with her knuckles and he shut up.
“This is shit,” she said patiently. “This has been stepped on so hard it wouldn’t give you a cold. We don’t want it. So you can have your whole stash back and walk, if you like. All we want to know is where you cut it. An address.”
“I don’t know any—”
“Do you want to be shot while escaping?” Ortega asked him pleasantly, and he grew suddenly very quiet.
“Place in Oakland,” he said sullenly.
Ortega gave him a pencil and paper. “Write it down. No names, just the address. And so help me, if you’re tinselling me I’ll come back here with fifty ccs of real Stiff and feed you the lot, unstepped.”
She took back the scrawled paper and glanced at it, removed her knee from the dealer’s neck and patted him on the shoulder.
“Good. Now get up and get the f*ck off the street. You can go back to work tomorrow, if this is the right place. And if it’s not, remember, I know your patch.”
We watched him lurch off and Ortega tapped the paper.
“I know this place. Controlled Substances busted them a couple of times last year, but some slick lawyer gets the important guys off every time. We’ll make a lot of noise, let them think they’re buying us off with a bag of uncut.”
“Fair enough.” I looked after the retreating figure of the dealer. “Would you really have shot him?”
“Nah.” Ortega grinned. “But he doesn’t know that. ConSub do it sometimes, just to get major dealers off the street when there’s something big going down. Official reprimand for the officer involved and compensation pays out for a new sleeve, but it takes time, and the scumbag does that time in the store. Plus it hurts to get shot. I was convincing, huh?”
“Convinced the f*ck out of me.”
“Maybe I should have been an Envoy.”
I shook my head. “Maybe you should spend less time around me.”

I stared up at the ceiling, waiting for the hypnophone sonocodes to lull me away from reality. On either side of me, Davidson, the Organic Damage datarat, and Ortega had settled into their racks and even through the hypnophones I could hear their breathing, slow and regular, at the limits of my neurachem perception. I tried to relax more, to let the hypnosystem press me down through levels of softly decreasing consciousness, but instead my mind was whirring through the details of the set-up like a program check scanning for error. It was like the insomnia I’d suffered after Innenin, an infuriating synaptic itch that refused to go away. When my peripheral vision time display told me that at least a full minute had gone by, I propped myself up on one elbow and looked around at the figures dreaming in the other racks.
“Is there a problem?” I asked loudly.
“The tracking of Sheryl Bostock is complete,” said the hotel. “I assumed you would prefer to be alone when I informed you.”
I sat upright and started picking the trodes off my body. “You assumed right. You sure everyone else is under?”
“Lieutenant Ortega and her colleagues were installed in the virtuality approximately two minutes ago. Irene Elliott has been established there since earlier this afternoon. She asked not to be disturbed.”
“What ratio are you running at the moment?”
“Eleven point fifteen. Irene Elliott requested it.” I nodded to myself as I climbed out of the rack. Eleven point one five was a standard working ratio for datarats. It was also the title of a particularly bloody but otherwise unmemorable Micky Nozawa experia flic. The only clear detail I could recall was that, unexpectedly, Micky’s character got killed at the end. I hoped it wasn’t an omen.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Between the dimly seen heave and swell of the sea and the lights of the cabin, there was a lemon grove. I went along a dirt track between the trees and the citrus fragrance felt like cleansing. From the long grass on either side, cicadas whirred reassuringly. In a velvet sky above were stars like fixed gems and behind the cabin the land rose into gentle hills and rocky outcroppings. The vague white forms of sheep moved in the darkness on the slopes, and from somewhere I heard a dog bark. The lights of a fishing village glimmered off to one side, less bright than the stars.
There were hurricane lamps slung from the upper rail of the cabin’s front porch, but no one was seated at the wooden tables there. The front wall bore a riotous abstract mural curling around and out from the luminous lettering of a sign that read Pension Flower of ‘68. Windchimes dangled along the railing, winking and turning in the faint breeze that blew in from the sea. They made a variety of gentle sounds from glassy belling to hollow wooden percussion.
On the unkempt sloping lawn in front of the porch someone had set out an incongruous collection of sofas and armchairs in a rough circle, so it looked as if the cabin had been lifted bodily off its furnished interior and set down again further up the slope. From the gathered seats came the soft sound of voices and the red embers of lit cigarettes. I reached for my own supply, realised I had neither the packet nor the need any more and grimaced wryly to myself in the dark.
Bautista’s voice rose above the murmur of conversation.
“Kovacs? That you?”
“Who else is it going to be?” I heard Ortega ask him impatiently. “This is a goddamn virtuality.”
“Yeah, but…” Bautista shrugged and gestured to the empty seats. “Welcome to the party.”
There were five figures seated in the circle of lounge furniture. Irene Elliott and Davidson were seated at opposite ends of a sofa beside Bautista’s chair. On the other side of Bautista, Ortega had sprawled her long-limbed body along the full length of a second sofa.
The fifth figure was relaxed deep into another armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, face sunk in shadows. Wiry black hair stuck up in silhouette above a multicoloured bandanna. Lying across his lap was a white guitar. I stopped in front of him.
“The Hendrix, right?”
“That’s correct.” There was a depth and timbre to the voice that had been absent before. The big hands moved across frets and dislodged a tumble of chords onto the darkened lawn. “Base entity projection. Hardwired in by the original designers. If you strip down the client-mirroring systems, this is what you get.”
“Good.” I took an armchair opposite Irene Elliott. “You happy with the working environment?”
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
“How long’ve you been here?”
“Me?” She shrugged. “A day or so. Your friends got here a couple of hours ago.”
“Two and a half,” said Ortega sourly. “What kept you?”
“Neurachem glitch.” I nodded at the Hendrix figure. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“That’s exactly what he told us.” Ortega’s gaze was wholly cop. “I’d just like to know what it means.”
I made a helpless gesture. “So would I. The Khumalo system kept kicking me out of the pipe, and it took us a while to get compatibility. Maybe I’ll mail the manufacturers.” I turned back to Irene Elliott. “I take it you’re going to want the format run up to maximum for the Dip.”
“You take it right.” Elliott jerked her thumb at the Hendrix figure. “Man says the place runs to three twenty-three max, and we are going to need every scrap of that to pull it off.”
“You cased the run yet?”
Elliott nodded glumly. “It’s locked up tighter than an orbital bank. But I can tell you a couple of interesting things. One, your friend Sarah Sachilowska was freighted off Head in the Clouds two days ago, relayed off the Gateway comsat out to Harlan’s World. So she’s out of the firing line.”
“I’m impressed. How long did it take you to dig that up?”
“A while.” Elliott inclined her head in the Hendrix’s direction. “I had some help.”
“And the second interesting thing?”
“Yeah. Covert needlecast to a receiver in Europe every eighteen hours. Can’t tell you much more than that without Dipping it, and I figured you wouldn’t want that just yet. But it looks like what we’re after.”
I remembered the spider-like automatic guns and leathery impact-resistant womb sacs, the sombre stone guardians that supported the roof of Kawahara’s basilica, and I found myself once more smiling in response to those contemptuous hooded smiles.
“Well, then.” I looked around at the assembled team. “Let’s get this gig off the ground.”