Altered Carbon

“You’re done. Is he on screen?”

Davidson punched a couple of buttons and nodded in satisfaction. In front of me, Bautista dumped the grav harness tackle on a seat. Ortega glanced at her watch and reached for the second dermal.

“Thirty-seven per cent,” she said. “Ready for the Big Chill?”

It was like being submerged in diamonds.

By the time we hit Head in the Clouds the drug had already eliminated most of my emotional responses and everything had the sharp and shiny edges of raw data. Clarity became a substance, a film of understanding that coated all I saw and heard around me. The stealth suit and the grav harness felt like samurai armour and when I drew the stungun from its sheath to check the settings, I could feel the charge coiled in it like a tangible thing.

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

The shard pistol, spider venom loaded, snugged across my lower ribs opposite the stu

The dispenser clip of termite microgrenades, each one not much larger or thicker than a data diskette, secured in a pouch on my left hip. In memoriam Iphigenia Deme.

The Tebbit knife on my forearm in its neural spring sheath beneath the stealth suit like a final word.

I reached for the cold feeling that had filled me up outside Jerry’s Closed Quarters and, in the crystalline depths of the Reaper, did not need it.

Mission time.

“Target visual,” called the pilot. “You want to come up and have a look at this baby?”

I glanced at Ortega, who shrugged, and the two of us went forward. Ortega seated herself beside the mohican and slipped on the co-pilot’s headset. I contented myself with standing next to Bautista in the access hatch. The view was just as good from there.

Most of the Lock-Mit’s cockpit was transparent alloy with instrumentation projected up onto it, permitting the pilot an uninterrupted view of the surrounding airspace; I remembered the feeling from Sharya, like riding a slightly concave tray, a tongue of steel or maybe a magic carpet, across the cloudscape below. A feeling that had been at once dizzying and godlike. I glanced at the mohican’s profile and wondered if he was as detached from that feeling as I was under the influence of the Reaper.

There were no clouds tonight. Head in the Clouds hung off to the left like a mountain village seen from afar. A cluster of tiny blue lights singing gently of homecoming and warmth in the icy black immensity. Kawahara seemed to have chosen the edge of the world for the whorehouse.

As we banked towards the lights, a squiggle of electronic sound filled the cockpit and the projected instrumentation dimmed briefly.

“That’s it, we’re acquired,” said Ortega sharply. “Here we go. I want a flyby under the belly. Let them get a good look.”

The mohican said nothing, but the nose of the transport dipped. Ortega reached up to an instrument panel projected onto the transparency above her head and touched a button. A hard, male voice crashed into the cabin.

“…that you are in restricted airspace. We are under licence to destroy intruding aircraft. Identify yourself immediately.”

“This is the Bay City police department,” said Ortega laconically. “Look out your window and you’ll see the stripes. We’re up here on official police business, pal, so if you so much as twitch a launcher in this direction I’ll have you blown out of the sky.”

There was a hissing silence. Ortega turned to look at me and gri

“State the nature of your business,” snapped the voice nastily.

Ortega peered out of the side of the cockpit as if looking for the speaker in amongst the airship’s superstructure. Her voice grew chilly. “So

More silence. We circled the airship five kilometres out. I started to pull on the gloves of the stealth suit.

“Lieutenant Ortega.” It was Kawahara’s voice this time, but in the depths of the betathanatine, even hatred seemed detached and I had to remind myself to feel it. Most of me was assessing the rapidity with which they had voice-printed Ortega. “This is a little unexpected. Do you have some kind of warrant? I believe our licences are in order.”

Ortega raised an eyebrow at me. The voiceprinting had impressed her too. She cleared her throat. “This is not a licensing matter. We are looking for a fugitive. If you’re going to start insisting on warrants, I might have to assume you’ve got a guilty conscience.”

“Don’t threaten me, lieutenant,” said Kawahara coldly. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”

“Reileen Kawahara, I imagine.” In the deathly silence that followed Ortega made a jubilant punching gesture at the ceiling and turned to grin at me. The barb had gone home. I felt the faintest ripple of amusement catch at the corners of my mouth.

“Perhaps you’d better tell me the name of this fugitive, lieutenant.” Kawahara’s voice had gone as smooth as the expression on an untenanted synthetic sleeve.

“His name is Takeshi Kovacs,” said Ortega, with another grin at me. “But he’s currently sleeved in the body of an ex-police officer. I’d like to ask you some questions concerning your relationship with this man.”

There was another long pause, and I knew the lure was going to work. I’d crafted its multiple layers with all the care of the finest Envoy deceit. Kawahara almost certainly knew of the relationship between Ortega and Ryker, could probably guess Ortega’s entanglement with the new tenant of her lover’s sleeve. She would buy Ortega’s anxiety at my disappearance. She would buy Ortega’s unsanctioned approach to Head in the Clouds. Given an assumed communication between Kawahara and Miriam Bancroft, she would believe she knew where I was and she would be confident that she had the upper hand over Ortega.

But more important than all of this, she would want to know how the Bay City police knew she was aboard Head in the Clouds. And since it was likely that they had, either directly or indirectly, gleaned the fact from Takeshi Kovacs, she would want to know how he knew. She would want to know how much he knew, and how much he had told the police.

She would want to talk to Ortega.

I fastened the wrist seals of the stealth suit and waited. We completed our third circuit of Head in the Clouds.

“You’d better come aboard,” said Kawahara finally. “Starboard landing beacon. Follow it in, they’ll give you a code.”

The Lock-Mit was equipped with a rear dispatch tube, a smaller, civilian variant of the drop launcher that on military models was intended for smart bombs or surveillance drones. The tube was accessed through the floor of the main cabin and with a certain amount of contortion I fitted inside, complete with stealth suit, grav harness and assorted weaponry. We’d practised this three or four times on the ground, but now with the transport swinging in towards Head in the Clouds, it suddenly seemed a long and complicated process. Finally, I got the last of the grav harness inside and Ortega rapped once on the suit’s helmet before she slammed the hatch down and buried me in darkness.

Three seconds later the tube blew open and spat me backwards into the night sky.