Altered Carbon

“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 begi

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 fuck 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 stu

“You traitorous fucking 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 fucking 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 stu

The stu

“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 gri

“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 fucking pay for that, Kovacs.”

She walked across to Trepp’s motionless form. “And you, you fuck,” she said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move. “What did this motherfucker 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?”