Altered Carbon

“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 fucking way. I’ve co

“Hardly multiple.”

“It’s a fucking 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 fuck 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 gri

“Convinced the fuck 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 sca

“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 ru

“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.