Altered Carbon

“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 I

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 I

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 fuck wanted to pull on the tiger sleeve and play kitty?”

“Well, well.” Kawahara tipped her head on one side as she made co

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.”