Altered Carbon

Chapter FORTY-ONE
The chamber was exactly as Miller had described it. Twenty metres wide and walled in non-reflective glass that sloped inward from roof to floor. On a clear day you could probably lie on that slope and peer down thousands of metres to the sea below. The décor was stark and owed a lot to Kawahara’s early millennium roots. The walls were smoke grey, the floor fused glass and the lighting came from jagged pieces of origami performed in illuminum sheeting and spiked on iron tripods in the corners of the room. One side of the room was dominated by a massive slab of black steel that must serve as a desk, the other held a group of shale-coloured loungers grouped around an imitation oil drum brazier. Beyond the loungers, an arched doorway led out to what Miller had surmised were sleeping quarters.
Above the desk, a slow weaving holodisplay of data had been abandoned to its own devices. Reileen Kawahara stood with her back to the door, staring out at the night sky.
“Forget something?” she asked distantly.
“No, not a thing.”
I saw how her back stiffened as she heard me, but when she turned it was with unhurried smoothness and even the sight of the shard gun didn’t crack the icy calm on her face. Her voice was almost as disinterested as it had been before she turned.
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“Think about it.” I gestured at the loungers. “Sit down over there, take the weight off your feet while you’re thinking.”
“Kadmin?”
“Now you’re insulting me. Sit down!”
I saw the realisation explode behind her eyes.
“Kovacs?” An unpleasant smile bent at her lips. “Kovacs, you stupid, stupid bastard. Do you have any idea what you’ve just thrown away?”
“I said sit down.”
“She has gone, Kovacs. Back to Harlan’s World. I kept my word. What do you think you’re doing here?”
“I’m not going to tell you again,” I said mildly. “Either you sit down now, or I’ll break one of your kneecaps.”
The thin smile stayed on Kawahara’s mouth as she lowered herself a centimetre at a time onto the nearest lounger. “Very well, Kovacs. We’ll play to your script tonight. And then I’ll have that fishwife Sachilowska dragged all the way back here and you with her. What are you going to do? Kill me?”
“If necessary.”
“For what? Is this some kind of moral stand?” The emphasis Kawahara laid on the last two words made it sound like the name of a product. “Aren’t you forgetting something? If you kill me here, it’ll take about eighteen hours for the remote storage system in Europe to notice and then re-sleeve me from my last update ‘cast. And it won’t take the new me very long to work out what happened up here.”
I seated myself on the edge of the lounger. “Oh, I don’t know. Look how long it’s taken Bancroft, and he still doesn’t have the truth, does he?”
“Is this about Bancroft?”
“No Reileen. This is about you and me. You should have left Sarah alone. You should have left me alone while you could.”
“Ohhh,” she cooed, mock maternal. “Did you get manipulated. I’m sorry.” She dropped the tone just as abruptly. “You’re an Envoy, Kovacs. You live by manipulation. We all do. We all live in the great manipulation matrix and it’s just one big struggle to stay on top.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t ask to be dealt in.”
“Kovacs, Kovacs.” Kawahara’s expression was suddenly almost tender. “None of us ask to be dealt in. You think I asked to be born in Fission City, with a web-fingered dwarf for a father and a psychotic whore for a mother. You think I asked for that? We’re not dealt in, we’re thrown in, and after that it’s just about keeping your head above water.”
“Or pouring water down other people’s throats,” I agreed amiably. “I guess you took after your mother, right?”
For a second it was as if Kawahara’s face was a mask cut from tin behind which a furnace was raging. I saw the fury ignite in her eyes and if I had not had the Reaper inside to keep me cold, I would have been afraid.
“Kill me,” she said, tight-lipped. “And make the most of it, because you are going to suffer, Kovacs. You think those sad-case revolutionaries on New Beijing suffered when they died? I’m going to invent new limits for you and your fish-smelling bitch.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Reileen. You see, your update needlecast went through about ten minutes ago. And on the way I had it Dipped. Didn’t lift anything, we just spliced the Rawling virus onto the ‘cast. It’s in the core by now, Reileen. Your remote storage has been spiked.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re lying.”
“Not today. You liked the work Irene Elliott did at Jack It Up? Well you should see her in a virtual forum. I bet she had time to take a half dozen mindbites while she was inside that needlecast. Souvenirs. Collector’s items in fact, because if I know anything about stack engineers, they’ll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.” I nodded over at the winding data display. “I should think you’ll get the alarm in another couple of hours. It took longer at Innenin but that was a long time ago. The technology’s moved on since then.”
Then she believed, and it was as if the fury I’d seen in her eyes had banked down to a concentrated white heat.
“Irene Elliott,” she said intently. “When I find her—”
“I think we’ve had enough empty threats for one day,” I interrupted without force. “Listen to me. Currently the stack you’re wearing is the only life you have, and the mood I’m in now it wouldn’t take much to make me cut it out of your spine and stamp on it. Before or after I shoot you, so shut up.”
Kawahara sat still, glaring at me out of slitted eyes. Her top lip drew fractionally back off her teeth for a moment, before control asserted itself.
“What do you want?”
“Better. What I want, right now, is a full confession of how you set Bancroft up. Resolution 653, Mary Lou Hinchley, the whole thing. You can throw in how you framed Ryker as well.”
“Are you wired for this?”
I tapped my left eyelid where the recording system had gone in and smiled.
“You really think I’m going to do this?” Kawahara’s rage glinted at me from behind her eyes. She was waiting, coiled, for an opening. I had seen her like this before, but then I hadn’t been on the receiving end of that look. I was in as much danger under those eyes as I had ever been under fire in the streets of Sharya. “You really think you’re going to get this from me?”
“Look on the bright side, Reileen. You can probably buy and influence your way out of the erasure penalty, and for the rest you might only get a couple of hundred years in the store.” My voice hardened. “Whereas, if you don’t talk, you’ll die right here and now.”
“Confession under duress is inadmissible under law.”
“Don’t make me laugh. This isn’t going to the UN. You think I’ve never been in a court before? You think I’d trust lawyers to deal with this? Everything you say here tonight is going express needlecast to WorldWeb One as soon as I’m back on the ground. That, and footage of whoever it was I wasted in the doggie room upstairs.” Kawahara’s eyes widened and I nodded. “Yeah, I should have said earlier. You’re a client down. Not really dead, but he’ll need re-sleeving. Now with all that, I reckon about three minutes after Sandy Kim goes live, the UN tacs are going to be blowing down your door with a fistful of warrants. They’ll have no choice. Bancroft alone will force their hand. You think the same people who authorised Sharya and Innenin are going to stick at a little constitutional rule bending to protect their power base? Now start talking.”
Kawahara raised her eyebrows, as if this was nothing more than a slightly distasteful joke she’d just been told. “Where would you like me to start, Takeshi-san?”
“Mary Lou Hinchley. She fell from here, right?”
“Of course.”
“You had her slated for the snuff deck? Some sick f*ck wanted to pull on the tiger sleeve and play kitty?”
“Well, well.” Kawahara tipped her head on one side as she made connections. “Who have you been talking to? Someone from the Wei Clinic, is it? Let me think. Miller was here for that little object lesson, but you torched him, so … Oh. You haven’t been headhunting again, Takeshi? You didn’t take Felipe Miller home in a hatbox, did you?”
I said nothing, just looked at her over the barrel of the shard gun, hearing again the weakened screaming through the door I’d listened at. Kawahara shrugged.
“It wasn’t the tiger, as it happens. But something of that sort, yes.”
“And she found out?”
“Somehow, yes.” Kawahara seemed to be relaxing, which under normal circumstances would have made me nervous. Under the betathanatine, it just made me more watchful. “A word in the wrong place, maybe something a technician said. You know, we usually put our snuff clients through a virtual version before we let them loose on the real thing. It helps to know how they’re going to react, and in some cases we even persuade them not to go through with it.”
“Very thoughtful of you.”
Kawahara sighed. “How do I get through to you, Takeshi? We provide a service here. If it can be made legal, then so much the better.”
“That’s bullshit, Reileen. You sell them the virtual, and in a couple of months they come sniffing after the real thing. There’s a causal link, and you know it. Selling them something illegal gives you leverage, probably over some very influential people. Get many UN governors up here, do you? Protectorate generals, that kind of scum?”
“Head in the Clouds caters to an elite.”
“Like that white-haired f*ck I greased upstairs? He was someone important, was he?”
“Carlton McCabe?” From somewhere, Kawahara produced an alarming smile. “You could say that, I suppose, yes. A person of influence.”
“Would you care to tell me which particular person of influence you’d promised they could rip the innards out of Mary Lou Hinchley?”
Kawahara tautened slightly. “No, I would not.”
“Suppose not. You’ll want that for a bargaining line later, won’t you? OK, skip it. So what happened? Hinchley was brought up here, accidentally found out what she was being fattened up for and tried to escape? Stole a grav harness, perhaps?”
“I doubt that. The equipment is kept under tight security. Perhaps she thought she could cling to the outside of one of the shuttles. She was not a very bright girl, apparently. The details are still unclear, but she must have fallen somehow.”
“Or jumped.”
Kawahara shook her head. “I don’t think she had the stomach for that. Mary Lou Hinchley was not a samurai spirit. Like most of common humanity, she would have clung to life until the last undignified moment. Hoping for some miracle. Begging for mercy.”
“How inelegant. Was she missed immediately?”
“Of course she was missed! She had a client waiting for her. We scoured the ship.”
“Embarrassing.”
“Yes.”
“But not as embarrassing as having her wash up on the shore a couple of days later, huh? The luck fairies were out of town that week.”
“It was unfortunate,” Kawahara conceded, as if we were discussing a bad hand of poker. “But not entirely unexpected. We were not anticipating a real problem.”
“You knew she was Catholic?”
“Of course. It was part of the requirements.”
“So when Ryker dug up that iffy conversion, you must have shat yourself. Hinchley’s testimony would have dragged you right into the open, along with f*ck knows how many of your influential friends. Head in the Clouds, one of the Houses, indicted for snuff and you with it. What was the word you used on New Beijing that time? Intolerable risk. Something had to be done, Ryker had to be shut down. Stop me if I’m losing the thread here.”
“No, you’re quite correct.”
“So you framed him?”
Kawahara shrugged again. “An attempt was made to buy him off. He proved … unreceptive.”
“Unfortunate. So what did you do then?”
“You don’t know?”
“I want to hear you say it. I want details. I’m doing too much of the talking here. Try to keep your end of the conversation up, or I might think you’re being uncooperative.”
Kawahara raised her eyes theatrically to the ceiling. “I framed Elias Ryker. I set him up with a false tip about a clinic in Seattle. We built a phone construct of Ryker and used it to pay Ignacio Garcia to fake the Reasons of Conscience decals on two of Ryker’s kills. We knew the Seattle PD wouldn’t buy it and that Garcia’s faking wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. There, is that better?”
“Where’d you get Garcia from?”
“Research on Ryker, back when we were trying to buy him off.” Kawahara shifted impatiently on the lounger. “The connection came up.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
“How perceptive of you.”
“So everything was nicely nailed down. Until Resolution 653 came along, and stirred it all up again. And Hinchley was still a live case.”
Kawahara inclined her head. “Just so.”
“Why didn’t you just stall it? Buy some decision makers on the UN Council?”
“Who? This isn’t New Beijing. You met Phiri and Ertekin. Do they look as if they’re for sale?:
I nodded. “So it was you in Marco’s sleeve. Did Miriam Bancroft know?”
“Miriam?” Kawahara looked perplexed. “Of course not. No one knew, that was the point. Marco plays Miriam on a regular basis. It was a perfect cover.”
“Not perfect. You play shit tennis, apparently.”
“I didn’t have time for a competence disc,”
“Why Marco? Why not just go as yourself?”
Kawahara waved a hand. “I’d been hammering at Bancroft since the resolution was tabled. Ertekin too, whenever she let me near her. I was making myself conspicuous. Marco putting in a word on my behalf makes me look more detached.”
“You took that call from Rutherford,” I said, mostly to myself. “The one to Suntouch House after we dropped in on him. I figured it was Miriam, but you were there as a guest, playing Marco on the sidelines of the great Catholic debate.”
“Yes.” A faint smile. “You seem to have greatly overestimated Miriam Bancroft’s role in all this. Oh, by the way, who is that you’ve got wearing Ryker’s sleeve at the moment? Just to satisfy my curiosity. They’re very convincing, whoever they are.”
I said nothing, but a smile leaked from one corner of my mouth. Kawahara caught it.
“Really? Double sleeving. You really must have Lieutenant Ortega wrapped around your little finger. Or wrapped around something, anyway. Congratulations. Manipulation worthy of a Meth.” She barked a short laugh. “That was meant as a compliment, Takeshi-san.”
I ignored the jibe. “You talked to Bancroft in Osaka? Thursday 16th August. You knew he was going?”
“Yes. He has regular business there. It was made to look like a chance encounter. I invited him to Head in the Clouds on his return. It’s a pattern for him. Buying sex after business deals. You probably found that out.”
“Yeah. So when you got him up here, what did you tell him?”
“I told him the truth.”
“The truth?” I stared at her. “You told him about Hinchley, and expected him to back you?”
“Why not?” There was a chilling simplicity in the look she gave me back. “We have a friendship that goes back centuries. Common business strategies that have sometimes taken longer than a normal human lifetime to bring to fruition. I hardly expected him to side with the little people.”
“So he disappointed you. He wouldn’t keep the Meth faith.”
Kawahara sighed again, and this time there was a genuine weariness in it that gusted out of somewhere centuries deep in dust.
“Laurens maintains a cheap romantic streak that I continually underestimate. He is not unlike you in many ways. But, unlike you, he has no excuse for it. The man is over three centuries old. I assumed—wanted to assume, perhaps—that his values would reflect that. That the rest was just posturing, speechmaking for the herd.” Kawahara made a negligent what-can-you-do gesture with one slim arm. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid.”
“What did he do? Take some kind of moral stand?”
Kawahara’s mouth twisted without humour. “You mock me? You, with the blood of dozens from the Wei Clinic fresh on your hands. A butcher for the Protectorate, an extinguisher of human life on every world where it has managed to find a foothold. You are, if I may say so, Takeshi, a little inconsistent.”
Secure in the cool wrap of the betathanatine, I could feel nothing beyond a mild irritation at Kawahara’s obtuseness. A need to clarify.
“The Wei Clinic was personal.”
“The Wei Clinic was business, Takeshi. They had no personal interest in you at all. Most of the people you wiped were merely doing their jobs.”
“Then they should have chosen another job.”
“And the people of Sharya. What choice should they have made? Not to be born on that particular world, at that particular time? Not to allow themselves to be conscripted, perhaps?”
“I was young and stupid,” I said simply. “I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learnt better. What happened at Innenin taught me better. Now I don’t kill for anyone but myself, and every time that I take a life, I know the value of it.”
“The value of it. The value of a human life.” Kawahara shook her head like a teacher with an exasperating student. “You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven’t you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you’ve seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?” She made a tiny spitting sound. “You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.”
“Bancroft didn’t think so.”
“Bancroft?” Kawahara made a disgusted noise deep in her throat. “Bancroft is a cripple, limping along on his archaic notions. It’s a mystery to me how he’s survived this long.”
“So you programmed him to suicide? Gave him a little chemical push?”
“Programmed him to…” Kawahara’s eyes widened and a delighted chuckle that was just the right blend of husk and chime issued from her sculpted lips. “Kovacs, you can’t be that stupid. I told you he killed himself. It was his idea, not mine. There was a time when you trusted my word, even if you couldn’t stomach my company. Think about it. Why would I want him dead?”
“To erase what you told him about Hinchley. When he was re-sleeved, his last update would be minus that little indiscretion.”
Kawahara nodded sagely. “Yes, I can see how that would fit for you. A defensive move. You have, after all, existed on the defensive since you left the Envoys. And a creature that lives on the defensive sooner or later comes to think on the defensive. You are forgetting one thing, Takeshi.”
She paused dramatically, and even through the betathanatine, a vague ripple of mistrust tugged at me. Kawahara was overplaying it.
“And what’s that?”
“That I, Takeshi Kovacs, am not you. I do not play on the defensive.”
“Not even at tennis?”
She offered me a calibrated little smile. “Very witty. I did not need to erase Laurens Bancroft’s memory of our conversation, because by then he had slaughtered his own Catholic whore, and had as much to lose as I from Resolution 653.”
I blinked. I’d had a variety of theories circling around the central conviction that Kawahara was responsible for Bancroft’s death, but none quite this garish. But as Kawahara’s words sank in, so did a number of pieces from that jagged mirror I’d thought was already complete enough to see the truth in. I looked into a newly revealed corner and wished I had not seen the things that moved there.
Opposite me, Kawahara grinned at my silence. She knew she’d dented me, and it pleased her. Vanity, vanity. Kawahara’s only but enduring flaw. Like all Meths, she had grown very impressed with herself. The admission, the final piece to my jigsaw, had slipped out easily. She wanted me to have it, she wanted me to see how far ahead of me she was, how far behind her I was limping along.
That crack about the tennis must have touched a nerve.
“Another subtle echo of his wife’s face,” she said, “carefully selected and then amped up with a little cosmetic surgery. He choked the life out of her. As he was coming for the second time, I think. Married life, eh Kovacs? What it must do to you males.”
“You got it on tape?” My voice sounded stupid in my own ears.
Kawahara’s smile came back. “Come on, Kovacs. Ask me something that needs an answer.”
“Bancroft was chemically assisted?”
“Oh, but of course. You were right about that. Quite a nasty drug, but then I expect you know—”
It was the betathanatine. The heart-dragging slow chill of the drug, because without it I would have been moving with the breath of air as the door opened on my flank. The thought crossed my mind as rapidly as it was able, and even as it did I knew by its very presence that I was going to be too slow. This was no time for thinking. Thought in combat was a luxury about as appropriate as a hot bath and massage. It fogged the whiplash clarity of the Khumalo’s neurachem response system and I spun, just a couple of centuries too late, shard gun lifting.
Splat!
The stun bolt slammed through me like a train, and I seemed to see the brightly lit carriage windows ratcheting past behind my eyes. My vision was a frozen frame on Trepp, crouched in the doorway, stungun extended, face watchful in case she’d missed or I was wearing neural armour beneath the stealth suit. Some hope. My own weapon dropped from nerveless fingers as my hand spasmed open and I pitched forward beside it. The wooden floor came up and smashed me on the side of the head like one of my father’s cuffs.
“What kept you?” asked Kawahara’s voice from a great height, distorted to a bass growl by my fading consciousness. One slim hand reached into my field of vision and retrieved the shard gun. Numbly, I felt her other hand tug the stungun free of the other holster.
“Alarm only went off a couple of minutes ago.” Trepp stepped into view, stowing her stungun, and crouched to look at me curiously. “Took McCabe a while to cool off enough to trip the system. Most of your half-assed security is still up on the main deck, goggling at the corpse. Who’s this?”
“It’s Kovacs,” said Kawahara dismissively, tucking the shard gun and stunner into her belt on her way to the desk. To my paralysed gaze, she appeared to be retreating across a vast plain, hundreds of metres with every stride until she was tiny and distant. Doll-like, she leaned on the desk and punched at controls I could not see.
I wasn’t going under.
“Kovacs?” Trepp’s face went abruptly impassive. “I thought—”
“Yes, so did I.” The holographic data weave above the desk awoke and unwound. Kawahara put her face closer, colours swirling over her features. “He double-sleeved on us. Presumably with Ortega’s help. You should have stuck around the Panama Rose a little longer.”
My hearing was still mangled, my vision frozen in place, but I wasn’t going under. I wasn’t sure if it was some side-effect of the betathanatine, another bonus feature of the Khumalo system, or maybe both in some unintended conjunction, but something was keeping me conscious.
“Being around a crime scene with that many cops makes me nervous,” said Trepp and put out a hand to touch my face.
“Yeah?” Kawahara was still absorbed in the dataflow. “Well, distracting this psycho with moral debate and true confessions hasn’t been good for my digestion, either. I thought you were never going to—F*ck!”
She jerked her head savagely to one side, then lowered it and stared at the surface of the desk.
“He was telling the truth.”
“About what?”
Kawahara looked up at Trepp, suddenly guarded. “Doesn’t matter. What are you doing to his face?”
“He’s cold.”
“Of course he’s f*cking cold.” The deteriorating language was a sure sign that Reileen Kawahara was rattled, I thought dreamily. “How do you think he got in past the infrareds? He’s Stiffed to the eyes.”
Trepp got up, face carefully expressionless. “What are you going to do with him?”
“He’s going into virtual,” said Kawahara grimly. “Along with his Harlanite fishwife friend. But before we do that, we have to perform a little surgery. He’s wearing a wire.”
I tried to move my right hand. The last joint of the middle finger twitched, barely.
“You sure he isn’t transmitting?”
“Yeah, he told me. Anyway, we would have nailed the transmission, soon as it started. Have you got a knife?”
A bone-deep tremor that felt suspiciously like panic ran through me. Desperately, I reached down into the paralysis for some sign of impending recovery. The Khumalo nervous system was still reeling. I could feel my eyes drying out from the lack of a blink reflex. Through smearing vision, I watched Kawahara coming back from the desk, hand held out expectantly to Trepp.
“I don’t have a knife.” I couldn’t be certain with the wow and flutter of my hearing, but Trepp’s voice sounded rebellious.
“No problem.” Kawahara took more long strides and disappeared from view, voice fading. “I’ve got something back here that’ll do just as well. You’d better whistle up some muscle to drag this piece of shit up to one of the decanting salons. I think seven and nine are prepped. Use the jack on the desk.”
Trepp hesitated. I felt something drop, like a tiny piece of ice thawing from the frozen block of my central nervous system. My eyelids scraped slowly down over my eyes, once and up again. The cleansing contact brought tears. Trepp saw it and stiffened. She made no move towards the desk.
The fingers of my right hand twitched and curled. I felt the beginnings of tension in the muscles of my stomach. My eyes moved.
Kawahara’s voice came through faintly. She must be in the other room, beyond the arch. “They coming?”
Trepp’s face stayed impassive. Her eyes lifted from me. “Yeah,” she said loudly. “Be here in a couple of minutes.”
I was coming back. Something was forcing my nerves back into sparking, fizzing life. I could feel the shakes setting in, and with them a soupy, suffocating quality to the air in my lungs that meant the betathanatine crash was coming on ahead of schedule. My limbs were moulded in lead and my hands felt as if I was wearing thick cotton gloves with a low electric current fizzing through them. I was in no condition for a fight.
My left hand was folded under me, flattened to the floor by the weight of my body. My right trailed out at an awkward side angle. It didn’t feel as if my legs would do much more than hold me up. My options were limited.
“Right then.” I felt Kawahara’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me onto my back like a fish for gutting. Her face was masked in concentration and there was a pair of needle-nosed pliers in her other hand. She knelt astride my chest and spread the lids of my left eye with her fingers. I forced down the urge to blink, held myself immobile. The pliers came down, jaws poised a half centimetre apart.
I tensed the muscles in my forearm, and the neural spring harness delivered the Tebbit knife into my hand.
I slashed sideways.
I was aiming for Kawahara’s side, below the floating ribs, but the combination of stun shakes and betathanatine crash threw me off and the knife blade sliced into her left arm below the elbow, jarred on the bone and bounced off. Kawahara yelled and released her grip on my eye. The pliers plunged down, off course, hit my cheekbone and carved a trough in the flesh of my cheek. I felt the pain distantly, metal snagging tissue. Blood spilled down into my eye. I stabbed again, weakly, but this time Kawahara twisted astride me and blocked downward with her injured arm. She yelled again and my fizzing glove grip on the knife slipped. The haft trickled away past my palm and the weapon was gone. Summoning all my remaining energy into my left arm, I hooked a savage punch up from the floor and caught Kawahara on the temple. She rolled off me, clutching at the wound in her arm, and for a moment I thought the blade had gone deep enough to mark her with the C-381 coating. But Sheila Sorenson had told me that the cyanide poisoning would do its work in the time it takes to draw a couple of breaths.
Kawahara was getting up.
“What the f*ck are you waiting for?” she enquired acidly of Trepp. “Shoot this piece of shit, will you?”
Her voice died on the last word as she saw the truth in Trepp’s face an instant before the pale woman went for her holstered stungun. Maybe it was a truth that was only dawning on Trepp herself at that moment, because she was slow. Kawahara dropped the pliers, cleared both shard gun and stunner from her belt with a snap and levelled them before Trepp’s weapon was even halfway out of the holster.
“You traitorous f*cking cunt,” Kawahara spat out wonderingly, her voice suddenly streaked through with a coarse accent I had never heard before. “You knew he was coming round, didn’t you? You’re f*cking dead, bitch.”
I staggered upright and lurched into Kawahara just as she pulled the triggers. I heard both weapons discharge, the almost supra-aural whine of the shard gun and the sharp electrical splatter of the stunner. Through the fogged vision in the corner of one eye, I saw Trepp make a desperate bid to complete her draw and not even come close. She went down, face almost comically surprised. At the same time my shoulder smashed into Kawahara and we stumbled back towards the slope of the windows. She tried to shoot me but I flailed the guns aside with my arms and tripped her. She hooked at me with her injured arm and we both went down on the angled glass.
The stunner was gone, skittering across the floor, but she’d managed to hang on to the shard gun. It swung round at me and I batted it down clumsily. My other hand punched at Kawahara’s head, missed and bounced off her shoulder. She grinned fiercely and headbutted me in the face. My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery and blood flooded down over my mouth. From somewhere I suffered an insane desire to taste it. Then Kawahara was on me, twisting me back against the glass and punching solidly into my body. I blocked one or two of the punches, but the strength was puddling out of me and the muscles in my arms were losing interest. Things started to go numb inside. Above me Kawahara’s face registered a savage triumph as she saw that the fight was over. She hit me once more, with great care, in the groin. I convulsed and slid down the glass into a sprawled heap on the floor.
“That ought to hold you, sport,” she grated, and jerked herself back to her feet, breathing heavily. Beneath the barely disarrayed elegance of her hair, I suddenly saw the face that this new accent belonged to. The brutal satisfaction in that face was what her victims in Fission City must have seen as she made them drink from the dull grey flask of the water carrier. “You just lie there for a moment.”
My body told me that I didn’t have any other option. I felt drenched in damage, sinking fast under the weight of the chemicals silting up my system and the shivering neural invasion of the stun bolt. I tried to lift one arm and it flopped back down like a fish with a kilo of lead in its guts. Kawahara saw it happen and grinned.
“Yeah, that’ll do nicely,” she said and looked absently down at her own left arm, where blood was trickling from the rent in her blouse. “You’re going to f*cking pay for that, Kovacs.”
She walked across to Trepp’s motionless form. “And you, you f*ck,” she said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move. “What did this motherf*cker do for you, anyway? Promise to eat your cunt for the next decade?”
Trepp made no response. I strained the fingers of my left hand and managed to move them a few centimetres across the floor towards my leg. Kawahara went to the desk with a final backward glance at Trepp’s body and touched a control.
“Security?”
“Ms.Kawahara.” It was the same male voice that had grilled Ortega on our approach to the airship. “There’s been an incursion on the—”
“I know what there’s been,” said Kawahara tiredly. “I’ve been wrestling with it for the last five minutes. Why aren’t you down here?”
“Ms.Kawahara?”
“I said, how long does it take you to get your synthetic ass down here on a call out?”
There was a brief silence. Kawahara waited, head bowed over the desk. I reached across my body and my right and left hands met in a weak clasp, then curled closed on what they held and fell back.
“Ms.Kawahara, there was no alert from your cabin.”
“Oh.” Kawahara turned back to look at Trepp. “OK, well get someone down here now. Squad of four. There’s some garbage to take out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In spite of everything, I felt a smile crawl onto my mouth. Ma’am?
Kawahara came back, scooping the pliers up off the floor on her way. “What are you grinning at, Kovacs?”
I tried to spit at her, but the saliva barely made it out of my mouth and hung in a thick streamer over my jaw, mingled with the blood. Kawahara’s face distorted with sudden rage and she kicked me in the stomach. On top of everything else, I barely felt it.
“You,” she began savagely, then forced the level of her voice back down to an accentless icy calm, “have caused more than enough trouble for one lifetime.”
She took hold of my collar and dragged me up the angled slope of the window until we were at eye level. My head lolled back on the glass and she leaned over me. Her tone eased back, almost to conversational.
“Like the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw material—that’s all you’ve ever been. You could have evolved beyond it and joined me on New Beijing, but you spat in my face and went back to your little people existence. You could have joined us again, here on Earth, joined in the steerage of the whole human race this time. You could have been a man of power, Kovacs. Do you understand that? You could have been significant.”
“I don’t think so,” I murmured weakly, starting to slide back down the glass. “I’ve still got a conscience rattling around in here somewhere. Just forgotten where I put it.”
Kawahara grimaced and redoubled her hold on my collar. “Very witty. Spirited. You’re going to need that, where you’re going.”
“When they ask how I died,” I said, “tell them: still angry.”
“Quell.” Kawahara leaned closer. She was almost lying on top of me now, like a sated lover. “But Quell never went into virtual interrogation, did she? You aren’t going to die angry, Kovacs. You’re going to die pleading. Over. And over. Again.”
She shifted her hold to my chest and pressed me down hard. The pliers came up.
“Have an aperitif.”
The jaws of the tool plunged into the underside of my eye and a spurt of blood sprinkled Kawahara’s face. Pain flared brightly. For a moment, I could see the pliers through the eye they were embedded in, towering away like a massive steel pylon, and then Kawahara twisted the jaws and something burst. My vision splashed red and then winked out, a dying monitor screen like the ones at Elliott’s Data Linkage. From my other eye I saw Kawahara withdraw the pliers with Reese’s recording wire gripped in the jaws. The rear end of the tiny device dripped minute spots of gore onto my cheek.
She’d go after Elliott and Reese. Not to mention Ortega, Bautista and who knew how many others.
“That’s f*cking enough,” I muttered in a slurred tone, and at the same moment, driving the muscles in my thighs to work, I locked my legs around Kawahara’s waist. My left hand slapped down flat on the sloping glass.
The muffled crump of an explosion, and a sharp cracking.
Dialled to the short end of its fuse option, the termite microgrenade was designed to detonate almost instantaneously and to deliver ninety per cent of its charge to the contact face. The remaining ten per cent still wrecked my hand, tearing the flesh from the Khumalo marrow alloy bones and carbon-reinforced tendons, ripping the poly-bond ligamenting apart and punching a coin-sized hole in my palm.
On the downward side, the window shattered like a thick plate of river ice. It seemed to happen in slow motion. I felt the surface cave in beside me and then I was sliding sideways into the gap. Vaguely, I registered the rush of cold air into the cabin. Above me, Kawahara’s face had gone stupid with shock as she realised what had happened, but she was too late. She came with me, flailing and smashing at my head and chest, but unable to break the lock I had on her waist. The pliers rose and fell, peeling a long strip of flesh from one cheekbone, plunging once into my wrecked eye, but by now the pain was far away, almost irrelevant, consumed entire by a bonfire of rage that had finally broken through what was left of the betathanatine.
Tell them: still angry.
Then the portion of glass we were struggling on gave way and tipped us out into the wind and sky.
And we fell …
My left arm was paralysed in position by some damage the explosion had done, but as we started to tumble down through the chilled darkness I brought my right hand around and cupped the other grenade against the base of Kawahara’s skull. I had a confused glimpse of the ocean far below, Head in the Clouds rocketing upwards away from us and an expression on Reileen Kawahara’s face that had left sanity as far behind as the airship. Something was screaming, but I no longer knew if the sound came from within or without. Perception was spiralling away from me in the shrill whistling of the air around us, and I could no longer find my way back to the little window of individual viewpoint. The fall was as seductive as sleep.
With what remained of my will, I clamped grenade and skull against my own chest, hard enough to detonate.
My last thought was the hope that Davidson was watching his screen.