Altered Carbon

“Chip?” He nodded at the machine and ignored me.

“Clive, this is Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a friend of Mr. Bancroft, looking for equipment. I’d like you to show him the Nemex and a Philips gun, and then pass him on to Sheila for a blade weapon.”

Clive nodded again and set aside the electromag.

“This way,” he said.

The mandroid touched my arm lightly. “Should sir require anything further, I shall be in the showroom.”

It bowed fractionally and left. I followed Clive along the rows of packing cases to where a variety of handguns were laid out on piles of plastic confetti. He selected one and turned back to me with it in his hands.

“Second series Nemesis X,” he said, holding out the gun. “The Nemex. Manufactured under licence for Ma

I took the weapon and turned it over in my hands. It was a big, heavy-barrelled pistol, slightly longer than the Smith & Wesson but well balanced. I swapped it hand to hand for a while, getting the feel of it, squinted down the sight. Clive waited beside me patiently

“All right.” I handed it back. “And something subtle?”

“Philips squeeze gun.” Clive reached into an open packing case and dug inside the confetti until he came up with a slim grey pistol almost half the size of the Nemex. “A solid steel load. Uses an electromagnetic accelerator. Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty metres. No recoil, and you’ve got a reverse field option on the generator that means the slugs can be retrieved from the target afterwards. Takes ten.”

“Batteries?”

“Specs are for between forty and fifty discharges. After that, you’re losing muzzle velocity with every shot. You get two replacement batteries included in the price and a recharging kit compatible with household power outlets.”

“Do you have a firing range? Somewhere I can try these out?”

“Out the back. But both these babies come with a virtual combat practice disc and that’s perfect parity between virtual and actual performance. Warranty guarantees it.”

“All right, fine.” Collecting on a guarantee like that might prove a slow process if some cowboy used the resulting unhandiness to put a bullet through your skull. No telling when you might get re-sleeved, if at all. But by now the ache in my head was begi

“Comes in boxes of five, both guns, but you get a free clip with the Nemex. Sort of a promotion for the new line. That going to be enough?”

“Not really. Give me two five-packs for both guns.”

“Ten clips, each?” There was a dubious respect in Clive’s voice. Ten clips is a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but I’d discovered that there were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more than actually hitting anything. “And you wanted a blade, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Sheila!” Clive turned away down the long room and called out to a tall woman with crewcut blonde hair who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with her hands in her lap and the matte grey of a virtual set masking her face. She looked round when she heard her name, remembered the mask and tipped it off, blinking. Clive waved at her and she uncoiled herself from the crate, swaying slightly from the shift back to reality as she got up.

“Sheila, this guy’s looking for steel. You want to help him out?”

“Sure.” The woman reached out a lanky arm. “Name’s Sheila Sorenson. What kind of steel you looking for?”

I matched her grip. “Takeshi Kovacs. I need something I can throw in a hurry, but it’s got to be small. Something I can strap to a forearm.”

“All right,” she said amiably. “Want to come with me? You finished here?”

Clive nodded at me. “I’ll take this stuff out to Chip, and he’ll package it up for you. You want it for delivery or carry out?”

“Carry out.”

“Thought so.”

Sheila’s end of the business turned out to be a small rectangular room with a couple of silhouette cork targets on one wall and an array of weapons ranging from stilettos to machetes hung on the other three. She selected a flat black knife with a grey metal blade about fifteen centimetres long and took it down.

“Tebbit knife,” she said inconsequentially. “Very nasty.”

And with every appearance of casualness she turned and unleashed the weapon at the left-hand target. It skipped through the air like something alive and buried itself in the silhouette’s head. “Tantalum steel alloy blade, webbed carbon hilt. There’s a flint set in the pommel for weighting and of course you can bash them over the head with that if you don’t get them with the sharp end.”

I stepped across to the target and freed the knife. The blade was narrow and honed to a razor’s edge on each side. A shallow gutter ran down the centre, delineated with a thin red line that had tiny, intricate characters etched into it. I tilted the weapon in an attempt to read the engraving, but it was in a code I didn’t recognise. Light glinted dully off the grey metal.

“What’s this?”

“What?” Sheila moved to stand beside me. “Oh, yeah. Bioweapon coding. The ru

“Charming.”

“Told you it was nasty, didn’t I.” There was pride in her voice.

“I’ll take it.”

Back out on the street, weighed down with my purchases, it occurred to me I’d need a jacket after all, if only to conceal the newly acquired arsenal. I cast a glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough sun in the sky to justify walking. I thought, at last, that my hangover was begi

I was three blocks down the hill before I realised I was being tailed.

It was the Envoy conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine, that told me. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver and a figure in the corner of my eye once too often. This one was good. In a more crowded part of town I might have missed it, but here the pedestrians were too thin on the ground to provide much camouflage.

The Tebbit knife was strapped to my left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural spring-load, but neither of the guns was accessible without making it obvious that I’d spotted my shadow. I debated trying to lose the tail, but abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to me. It wasn’t my town, I felt sludgy with chemicals and anyway I was carrying too much. Let whoever it was come shopping with me. I picked up my pace a little and worked my way gradually down into the commercial centre, where I found an expensive thigh-length red and blue wool coat with Inuit-inspired totem pole figures chasing each other in lines across it. It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, but it was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at the shop’s glass front, I managed to catch a glimpse of my tail’s face. Young, Caucasian, dark hair. I didn’t know him.

The two of us crossed Union Square, pausing to take in another Resolution 653 demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The chants wavered, people drifted away and the metallic bark of the p.a. system was begi