Altered Carbon

“Says here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of incentive. Nice job.” Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion. “We’ve got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice. That’s an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to Compliance at Machine Error, the sun’s going to be a red dwarf by the time they let you off stack.”

Kadmin smiled. “Then what are you here for?”

“Who sent you?” I asked him softly.

“The Dog speaks!

I inhaled smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I had Quell’s Poems and Other Prevarications more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn’t a great translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that anyone not actually from Harlan’s World could quote such an obscure volume.

I finished it for him.

“Have you come seeking blame, Mr. Kovacs?”

“Among other things.”

“How disappointing.”

“You expected something else?”

“No,” said Kadmin with another smile. “Expectation is our first mistake. I meant, how disappointing for you.”

“Maybe.”

He shook his great piebald head. “Certainly. You will take no names from me. If you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.”

“That’s very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.”

“Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.” Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. “Are you threatening me in monitored police storage?”

“No. I’m just putting things into perspective.” I knocked ash off my cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor. “Someone’s pulling your strings; that’s who I’m going to wipe. You’re nothing. You I wouldn’t waste spit on.”

Kadmin tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the sky, like Cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it was with a curious light in his eyes.

“I was not asked to kill you,” he said tonelessly, “unless your abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.”

Ortega was on him as the last syllable left his mouth. The table blinked out of existence and she kicked him backwards off the chair with one booted foot. As he rolled back to his feet, the same boot caught him in the mouth and floored him again. I ran my tongue round the almost healed gashes inside my own mouth, and felt a distinct lack of sympathy.

Ortega dragged Kadmin up by the hair, the cigarette in her hand replaced by a vicious-looking blackjack courtesy of the same system magic that had eliminated the table.

“I hear you right?” she hissed. “You making threats, rackhead?”

Kadmin bared his teeth in a bloodstained grin.

“Police brutal—”

“That’s right, motherfucker.” Ortega hit him across the cheek with the blackjack. The skin split. “Police brutality in a monitored police virtuality. Sandy Kim and WorldWeb One would have a field day, wouldn’t they? But you know what? I reckon your lawyers aren’t going to want to run this particular tape.”

“Leave him alone, Ortega.”

She seemed to remember herself then, and stepped back.

Her face twitched and she drew a deep breath. The table blinked back and Kadmin was suddenly sitting upright again, mouth undamaged.

“You too,” he said quietly.

“Yeah, sure.” There was contempt in Ortega’s voice, at least half of it directed at herself I guessed. She made a second effort to bring her breathing back under control, rearranged her clothing u

“Whoever sent you worth this much, Kadmin?” I wondered softly. “You going down silent out of contractual loyalty, or are you just scared shitless?”

For answer, the composite man folded his arms across his chest and stared through me.

“You through, Kovacs?” asked Ortega.

I tried to meet Kadmin’s distant gaze. “Kadmin, the man I work for has a lot of influence. This could be your last chance to cut a deal.”

Nothing. He didn’t even blink.

I shrugged. “I’m through.”

“Good,” said Ortega grimly. “Because sitting downwind of this piece of shit is begi

At that, Kadmin’s eyes turned up to meet hers, and a small, peculiarly unpleasant smile twisted his lips.

We left.

Back on the fourth floor, the walls of Ortega’s office had reverted to a dazzling high noon over beaches of white sand. I screwed up my eyes against the glare while Ortega trawled through a desk drawer and came up with her own and a spare pair of sunglasses.

“So what did you learn from that?”

I fitted the lenses uncomfortably over the bridge of my nose. They were too small. “Not much, except that little gem about not having orders to wipe me. Someone wanted to talk to me. I’d pretty much guessed that anyway, else he could have just blown my stack out all over the lobby of the Hendrix. Still, means someone wanted to cut a deal of their own, outside of Bancroft.”

“Or someone wanted to interrogate the guts out of you.”

I shook my head. “About what? I’d only just arrived. Doesn’t make any sense.”

“The Corps? Unfinished business?” Ortega made little flicking motions with her hand as if she were dealing me the suggestions. “Maybe a grudge match?”

“No. We went through this one when we were yelling at each other the other night. There are people who’d like to see me wiped, but none of them live on Earth, and none of them swing the kind of influence to go interstellar. And there’s nothing I know about the Corps that isn’t in a low-wall datastack somewhere. And anyway, it’s just too much of a fucking coincidence. No, this is about Bancroft. Someone wanted in on the program.”

“Whoever had him killed?”

I tipped my head down to look at her directly over the sun lenses. “You believe me, then.”

“Not entirely.”

“Oh, come on.”

But Ortega wasn’t listening. “What I want to know,” she brooded, “is why he rewrote his codes at the end. You know, we’ve sweated him nearly a dozen times since we downloaded him Sunday night. That’s the first time he’s come close to even admitting he was there.”

“Even to his lawyers?”

“We don’t know what he says to them. They’re big-time sharks, out of Ulan Bator and New York. That kind of money carries a scrambler into all privy virtual interviews. We get nothing on tape but static.”

I raised a mental eyebrow. On Harlan’s World, all virtual custody was monitored as a matter of course. Scramblers were not permitted, no matter how much money you were worth.