Altered Carbon

The sensation was a dimly remembered joy, something this sleeve did not recall at a cellular level. From the cramped confines of the tube and the noisy vibration of the transport’s engines I was suddenly blasted into absolute space and silence. Not even the rush of air made it through the foam padding on the suit’s helmet as I fell. The grav harness kicked in as soon as I was clear of the tube and braked my fall before it got properly started. I felt myself borne up on its field, not quite motionless, like a ball bobbing on top of the column of water from a fountain. Pivoting about, I watched the navigation lights of the transport shrink inward against the bulk of Head in the Clouds.

The airship hung above and before me like a threatening storm cloud. Lights glimmered out at me from the curving hull and the gantried superstructure beneath. Ordinarily it would have given me the cringing sensation of being a sitting target, but the betathanatine soothed the emotions away in a clean rush of data detail. In the stealth suit I was as black as the surrounding sky and all but radar invisible. The grav field I was generating might theoretically show up on a sca

I set the impellers in cautious forward drive and drifted towards the massive, curving wall of the hull. Inside the helmet, simulation graphics awoke on the surface of the visor and I saw the entry points Irene Elliott had found for me delineated in red. One in particular, the unsealed mouth of a disused sampling turret, was pulsing on and off next to fine green lettering that spelled Prospect One. I rose steadily upward to meet it.

The turret mouth was about a metre wide and scarred around the edges where the atmosphere sampling system had been amputated. I got my legs up in front of me—no mean achievement in a grav field—and hooked myself over the lip of the hatch, then concentrated on worming myself inside up to the waist. From there I twisted onto my front to clear the grav harness and was able to slide myself through the gap and onto the floor of the turret. I switched the grav harness off.

Inside, there was barely enough crawlspace tor a technician lying on his back to check the nest of equipment. At the back of the turret was an antique airlock, complete with pressure wheel, just as Irene Elliott’s Dipped blueprints had promised. I wriggled around until I could grasp the wheel with both hands, conscious that both suit and harness were catching on the narrow hatchway, and that my exertions so far had almost totally depleted my immediate body strength. I drew a deep breath to fuel my comatose muscles, waited for my slowed heartbeat to pump the oxygen round my body and heaved at the wheel. Against my expectations it turned quite easily and the airlock hatch fell outward. Beyond the hatch was an airy darkness.

I lay still for a while, mustering more muscular strength. The two-shot Reaper cocktail was taking some getting used to. On Sharya we hadn’t needed to go above twenty per cent. Ambient temperatures in Zihicce were quite high and the spider tanks’ infrared sensors were crude. Up here, a body at Sharyan room temperature would set off every alarm in hull. Without careful oxygen fuelling, my body would rapidly exhaust its cellular level energy reserves and leave me gasping on the floor like a gaffed bottleback. I lay still, breathing deep and slow.

After a couple of minutes, I twisted around again and unfastened the grav harness, then slid carefully through the hatch and hit a steel grid walkway with the heels of my hands. I curled the rest of my body slowly out of the hatch, feeling like a moth emerging from a chrysalis. Checking the darkened walkway in either direction I rose to my feet and removed the stealth suit helmet and gloves. If the keel plans Irene Elliott had Dipped from the Tampa aeroyard stack were still accurate, the walkway led down among the huge helium silos to the vessel’s aft buoyancy control room and from there I’d be able to climb a maintenance ladder directly onto the main operating deck. According to what we’d patched together out of Miller’s interrogation, Kawahara’s quarters were two levels below on the port side. She had two huge windows that looked downward out of the hull.

Summoning the blueprints from memory, I drew the shard pistol and set off towards the stern.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to reach the buoyancy control room, and I saw no one on the way. The control room itself appeared to be automated and I began to suspect that these days hardly anyone bothered to visit the swooping canopies of the airship’s upper hull. I found the maintenance ladder and climbed painstakingly down it until a warm upward-spilling glow on my face told me I was almost on the operating deck. I stopped and listened for voices, hearing and proximity sense both strained to their limits for a full minute before I lowered myself the final four metres and dropped to the floor of a well lit, carpeted passageway. It was deserted in both directions.

I checked my internal time display and stowed the shard gun. Mission time was accumulating. By now Ortega and Kawahara would be talking. I glanced around at the décor and guessed that whatever function the operating deck had once been intended to serve, it wasn’t serving it now. The passageway was decked out in opulent red and gold with stands of exotic plant life and lamps in the form of coupling bodies every few metres. The carpet beneath my feet was deep, and woven with highly detailed images of sexual abandon. Male, female and variants between twined around each other along the length of the corridor in an unbroken progression of plugged orifices and splayed limbs. The walls were hung with similarly explicit holoframes that gasped and moaned into life as I passed them. In one of them I thought I recognised the dark-haired, crimson-lipped woman of the street ‘cast advertisement, the woman who might have pressed her thigh against mine in a bar on the other side of the globe.

In the cold detachment of the betathanatine, none of it had any more impact than a wall full of Martian techno-glyphs.

There were plushly appointed double doors set into each side of the corridor at about ten-metre intervals. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was behind the doors. Jerry’s biocabins, by any other name, and each door was just as likely as not to disgorge a client at any moment. I quickened my pace, searching for a co

I was almost there when a door five metres ahead of me swung open. I froze, hand on the grip of the shard gun, shoulders to the wall, gaze gripped to the leading edge of the door. The neurachem thrummed.

In front of me, a grey furred animal that was either half-grown wolf cub or dog emerged from the open door with arthritic slowness. I kept my hand on the shard gun and eased away from the wall, watching. The animal was not much over knee height and it moved on all fours, but there was something badly wrong with the structure of the rear legs. Something wrenched. Its ears were laid back and a minute keening came from its throat. It turned its head towards me and for a moment my hand tightened on the shard gun, but the animal only looked at me for a moment and the mute suffering in its eyes was enough to tell me I was in no danger. Then it limped painfully along the corridor to a room farther down on the opposite wall and paused there, the long head down close to the door as if listening.

With a dreamlike sense of lost control, I followed and leaned my own head against the surface of the door. The soundproofing was good, but no match for the Khumalo neurachem at full stretch. Somewhere down near the limits of hearing, noises trickled into my ear like stinging insects. A dull, rhythmic thudding sound and something else that might have been the pleading screams of someone whose strength was almost gone. It stopped almost as soon as I had tuned it in.