Altered Carbon

“Oh, that.” Ortega grunted and her eyes swivelled back down to the screen display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might be grey/green, like the sea around the maelstrom. “It’s out of synch. The department got it cheap from some place in El Paso Juarez. Jams up completely sometimes.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah, sometimes I’ll just turn it off but the neons are—” She looked up abruptly. “What the fuck am I—Kovacs, do you know how close you are to a storage rack right now?”

I made a span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it.

“About the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.”

“We can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the front door larger than life.”

I shrugged.

“And don’t think your Meth co

“Impound his vehicle did you?” I asked casually. “Or did Wei reclaim it before you could run tests?”

Ortega’s mouth compressed into a hard line.

I nodded. “Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei spring him, I imagine.”

“Listen, Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of time, motherfucker. Strictly that.”

“Admirable tenacity,” I said. “Shame you didn’t have some of that for the Bancroft case.”

“There is no fucking Bancroft case.”

Ortega was on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust. I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant drew a deep breath, and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked at her nails.

“Do you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?”

“Black market spare parts? Virtual torture programmes? Or didn’t they let you stay that long?”

“We found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen dead people. Really dead.”

She looked up at me again, the disgust still there.

“You’ll have to pardon my lack of reaction,” I said coldly. “I saw a lot worse when I was in uniform. In fact, I did a lot worse when I was righting the Protectorate’s battles for them.”

“That was war.”

“Oh, please.”

She said nothing. I leaned forward across the desk.

“And don’t tell me those seventeen bodies are what you’re on fire about, either.” I gestured at my own face. “This is your problem. You don’t like the idea of someone carving this up.”

She sat silent for a moment, thinking, then reached into a drawer of the desk and took out a packet of cigarettes. She offered them to me automatically and I shook my head with clenched determination.

“I quit.”

“Did you?” There was genuine surprise in her voice, as she fed herself a cigarette and lit it. “Good for you. I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, Ryker should be pleased too, when he gets off stack.”

She paused behind the veil of smoke, then dropped the packet back into the drawer and palm-heeled it shut.

“What do you want?” she asked flatly.

The holding racks were five floors down in a double-storey basement where it was easier to regulate temperatures. Compared to PsychaSec, it was a toilet.

“I don’t see that this is going to change anything,” said Ortega as we followed a yawning technician along the steel gantry to slot 3089b. “What’s Kadmin going to tell you that he hasn’t told us?”

“Look.” I stopped and turned to face her, hands spread and held low. On the narrow gantry we were uncomfortably close. Something chemical happened, and the geometries of Ortega’s stance seemed suddenly fluid, dangerously tactile. I felt my mouth dry up.

“I—” she said.

“3089b,” called the technician, hefting the big, thirty-centimetre disc out of its slot. “This the one you wanted, lieutenant?”

Ortega pushed hurriedly past me. “That’s it, Micky. Can you set us up with a virtual?”

“Sure.” Micky jerked a thumb at one of the spiral staircases collared in at intervals along the gantry. “You want to go down to Five, slap on the trodes. Take about five minutes.”

“The point is,” I said, as the three of us clattered down the steel steps, “you’re the Sia. Kadmin knows you, he’s been dealing with you all his professional life. It’s part of what he does. I’m an unknown. If he’s never been extra-system, the chances are he’s never met an Envoy before. And they tell nasty stories about the Corps most places I’ve been.”

Ortega gave me a sceptical look over her shoulder. “You’re going to frighten him into a statement? Dimitri Kadmin? I don’t think so.”

“He’ll be off balance, and when people are off balance they give things away. Don’t forget, this guy’s working for someone who wants me dead. Someone who is scared of me, at least superficially. Some of that may rub off on Kadmin.”

“And this is supposed to convince me that someone murdered Bancroft after all?”

“Ortega, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. We’ve been through this already. You want Ryker’s sleeve back in the tank asap, out of harm’s way. The sooner we get to whatever bottom there is to Bancroft’s death, the sooner that happens. And I’m a lot less likely to incur substantial organic damage if I’m not stumbling around in the dark. If I have your help, in fact. You don’t want this sleeve to get written off in another firefight, do you?”

“Another firefight?” It had taken nearly half an hour of heated discussion to hammer the sense of the new relationship into Ortega, and the policewoman in her still hadn’t gone to sleep on me.

“Yeah, after the Hendrix,” I improvised rapidly, cursing the face-to-face chemical interlock that had put: me off balance. “I picked up some bad bruising there. Could have been a lot worse.”

She shot me another, longer glance over her shoulder.

The virtual interrogation system was housed in a series of bubblefab cabins at one side of the basement floor. Micky settled both of us onto weary-looking automould couches that were slow to respond to our forms, applied the electrodes and hypnophones, then kicked in the power with a concert pianist’s sweep of one arm across two of the utilitarian consoles. He studied the screens as they blinked on.

“Traffic,” he said, and hawked congestion into the back of his throat with disgust. “Commissioner’s hooked in with some kind of conference environment and it’s soaking up half the system. Got to wait till someone else gets off.” He glanced back at Ortega. “Hey, that the Mary Lou Hinchley thing?”

“Yeah.” Ortega looked across to include me in the conversation, maybe as evidence of our new co-operation. “Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean. Mary Lou Hinchley. Not much left of the body, but they got the stack. Set it to spin and guess what?”

“Catholic?”

“In one. That Total Absorb stuff works, huh? Yeah, the first entry scan comes up with Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals. Usually the end of the line in a case like that, but El—” She stopped. Restarted. “The detective in charge wouldn’t let it go. Hinchley was from his neighbourhood, he knew her when she was growing up. Not well, but—” she shrugged “—he wouldn’t let it go.”

“Very tenacious. Elias Ryker?”

She nodded.

“He pushed the path labs for a month. In the end they found some evidence the body had been thrown out of an aircar. Organic Damage did some background digging and came up with a conversion less than ten months old and a hardline Catholic boyfriend with skills in infotech who might have faked the Vow. The girl’s family are border-liners, nominally Christian, but mostly not Catholic. Quite rich as well, with a vault full of stacked ancestors that they spin out for family births and marriages. The Department’s been in virtual consultation with the lot of them on and off all of this year.”