Altered Carbon

And back beyond that, I remembered the moth-battered paper lanterns outside Watanabe’s on a Newpest Friday night. My teenage skin slick with sweat from the jungle wind blowing out of the south and my eyes glittering with tetrameth in one of the big windchime mirrors. Talk, cheaper than the big bowls of ramen, about big scores and yakuza co

He never told us how he’d got that sleeve, just as he never denied or confirmed the rumours about his escapades with the marine corps, the Quell Memorial Brigade, the Envoys, whatever. An older gang member once told us he’d seen Watanabe face down a roomful of Seven Per Cent Angels with nothing but his pipe in his hands, and some kid from the swamp towns once came up with a fuzzy slice of newsreel footage he claimed was from the Settlement wars. It was only two-d, hurriedly shot just before an assault team went over the top, but the sergeant being interviewed was subtitled Watanabe, Y and there was something about the way he tilted his head when questioned that had us all crowing recognition at the screen. But then Watanabe was a common enough name, and come to that, the guy who said he’d seen the Angels facedown was also fond of telling us how he’d slept with a Harlan family heiress when she came slumming, and none of us believed that.

Once, on a rare evening when I was both straight and alone at Watanabe’s, I swallowed enough of my adolescent pride to ask the old man for his advice. I’d been reading UN armed forces promotional literature for weeks, and I needed someone to push me one way or the other.

Watanabe just gri

We both looked around the little bar and the fields beyond the deck.

“Well, uh, yes.”

“Well, uh, no,” he said firmly, and resumed his pipe.

“Kovacs?”

I blinked and found Ortega in front of me, looking curiously into my eyes.

“Something I need to know about?”

I smiled faintly and glanced around at the kitchen’s shining steel counters. “Not really.”

“It’s good food,” she said, misinterpreting the look.

“Well, let’s get some, then.”

She led me out of the steam and onto one of the restaurant’s gantries. The Flying Fish was, according to Ortega, a decommissioned aerial minesweeper that some oceanographic institute had bought up. The institute was now either defunct or had moved on and the bayward-facing facility had been gutted, but someone had stripped the Flying Fish, rerigged her as a restaurant and cabled her five hundred metres above the decaying facility buildings. Periodically the whole vessel was reeled gently back down to earth to disgorge its sated customers and take on fresh. There was a queue around two sides of the docking hangar when we arrived but Ortega jumped it with her badge, and when the airship came floating down through the open roof of the hangar, we were the first aboard.

I settled cross-legged onto cushions at a table that was secured to the blimp’s hull on a metal arm and thus did not touch the gantry at all. The gantry itself was cordoned with the faint haze of a power screen that kept the temperature decent and the gusting wind to a pleasant breeze. Around me the hexagonal grating floor allowed me an almost uninterrupted view past the edge of the cushions to the sea a kilometre below. I shifted uneasily. Heights had never been my strong point.

“Used to use it for tracking whales and stuff,” said Ortega, gesturing sideways at the hull. “Back before places like this could afford the satellite time. ‘Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.”

She paused. “I was born on Understanding Day,” she added inconsequentially.

“Really?”

“Yep. January 9th. They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.”

“Nice.”

Who she was really talking to caught up with her. She shrugged, abruptly dismissive. “When you’re a kid you don’t see it that way. I wanted to be called Maria.”

“You come here often?”

“Not often. But I figured anyone out of Harlan’s World would like it.”

“Good guess.”

A waiter arrived and carved the menu into the air between us with a holotorch. I glanced briefly down the list and selected one of the ramen bowls at random. Something vegetarian.

“Good choice,” said Ortega. She nodded at the waiter. “I’ll have the same. And juice. You want anything to drink?”

“Water.”

Our selections flared briefly in pink and the menu disappeared. The waiter pocketed the holotorch at his breast with a snappy gesture and withdrew. Ortega looked around her, seeking neutral conversation.

“So, uh—you got places like this in Millsport?”

“On the ground, yes. We’re not big on aerial stuff.”

“No?” She raised her customary eyebrow. “Millsport’s an archipelago, isn’t it? I would have thought airships were—”

“An obvious solution to the real estate shortage? Right as far as that goes, but I think you’re forgetting something.” I flicked my eyes skywards. “We Are Not Alone.”

It clicked. “The orbitals? They’re hostile?”

“Mmm. Let’s say capricious. They tend to shoot down anything airborne that masses more than a helicopter. And since no one’s ever been able to get close enough to decommission one of them, or even get aboard, come to that, we have no way of knowing what their exact programming parameters are. So we just play it safe, and don’t go up in the air much.”

“Must make IP traffic tough.”

I nodded. “Well, yeah. ‘Course, there isn’t much traffic anyway. No other habitable planets in the system, and we’re still too busy exploiting the World to bother about terraforming. Few exploration probes, and maintenance shuttles to the Platforms. Bit of exotic element mining, that’s about it. And there are a couple of launch windows down around the equator towards evening and one crack of dawn slot up on the pole. It looks like a couple of orbitals must have crashed and burned, way back when, left holes in the net.” I paused. “Or maybe someone shot them down.”

“Someone? You mean someone, not the Martians?”

I spread my hands. “Why not? Everything they’ve ever found on Mars was razed or buried. Or so well disguised we spent decades looking right at it before we even realised it was there. It’s the same on most of the Settled worlds. All the evidence points to some kind of conflict out there.”

“But the archaeologues say it was a civil war, a colonial war.”

“Yeah, right.” I folded my arms and sat back. “The archaeologues say what the Protectorate tells them to say, and right now it’s fashionable to deplore the tragedy of the Martian domain tearing itself apart and sinking via barbarism into extinction. Big warning for the inheritors. Don’t rebel against your lawful rulers, for the good of all civilisation.”

Ortega looked nervously around her. Conversation at some of the nearer tables had skittered and jarred to a halt. I gave the spectators a wide smile.

“Do you mind if we talk about something else?” Ortega asked uncomfortably.

“Sure. Tell me about Ryker.”

The discomfort vanished into an icy stillness. Ortega put her hands flat on the table in front of her and looked at them.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said eventually.

“Fair enough.” I watched cloud formations shimmer in the haze of the power screen for a while, and avoided looking down at the sea below me. “But I think you want to, really.”