Altered Carbon

“Mh-mmmm.”

“Of course, the police were suspicious—”

“Really?”

“—but they couldn’t prove anything. Couple of the kids had been into some nasty chemicals, they were jerking around with the local yakuza, no one was really surprised when they disappeared.”

“Is there a point to this story?”

“Yeah. See, Ludmila got rid of her fucking useless children, but it didn’t really help. She still needed someone to man the curing vats, to haul the belaweed up and down the mill stairs, and she was still broke. So what did she do?”

“Something gory, I imagine.”

I nodded. “What she did, she picked the bits of her mangled kids out of the thresher and stitched them into a huge three-metre-tall carcass. And then, on a night sacred to the dark powers, she invoked a Tengu to—”

“A what?”

“A Tengu. It’s a sort of mischief-maker, a demon I guess you’d call it. She invoked the Tengu to animate the carcass, and then she stitched it in.”

“What, when it wasn’t looking?”

“Ortega, it’s a fairy story. She stitched the soul of the Tengu inside, but she promised to release it if it served her will nine years. Nine’s a sacred number in the Harlanite pantheons, so she was as bound to the agreement as the Tengu. Unfortunately—”

“Ah.”

“—Tengu are not known for their patience, and I don’t suppose old Ludmila was the easiest person to work for either. One night, not a third of the way through the contract, the Tengu turned on her and tore her apart. Some say it was Kishimo-jin’s doing, that she whispered terrible incitements into the Tengu’s ear at—”

“Kishimo Gin?”

“Kishimo-jin, the divine protectress of children. It was her revenge on Ludmila for the death of the children. That’s one version, there’s another that—” I picked up Ortega’s mutinous expression out of the corner of my eye and hurried on.“Well, anyway, the Tengu tore her apart, but in so doing it locked itself into the spell and was condemned to remain imprisoned in the carcass. And now, with the original invoker of the spell dead, and worse still, betrayed, the carcass began to rot. A piece here, a piece there, but irreversibly. And so the Tengu was driven to prowling the streets and mills of the textile quarter, looking for fresh meat to replace the rotting portions of its body. It always killed children, because the parts it needed to replace were child-sized, but however many times it sewed new flesh to the carcass—”

“It’d learnt to sew, then?”

“Tengu are multi-talented. However many times it replaced itself, after a few days the new portions began to putrefy, and it was driven out once more to hunt. In the quarter they call it the Patchwork Man.”

I fell silent. Ortega mouthed a silent O, then slowly exhaled smoke through it. She watched the smoke dissipate, then turned to face me.

“Your mother tell you that story?”

“Father. When I was five.”

She looked at the end of her cigarette. “Nice.”

“No. He wasn’t. But that’s another story.” I stood up and looked down the street to where the crowd was massed at one of the incident barriers. “Kadmin’s out there, and he’s out of control. Whoever he was working for, he’s working for himself now.”

“How?” Ortega spread her hands in exasperation. “OK, an AI could tu

“Microsecond’s all it needed.”

“But Kadmin isn’t on stack. They’d need to know when he was being spun, and they’d need a fix. They’d need…”

She stopped as she saw it coming.

“Me.” I finished for her. “They’d need me.”

“But you—”

“I’m going to need some time to sort this out, Ortega.” I spun my cigarette into the gutter and grimaced as I tasted the inside of my own mouth. “Today, maybe tomorrow too. Check the stack. Kadmin’s gone. If I were you, I’d keep your head down for a while.”

Ortega pulled a sour face. “You telling me to go undercover in my own city?”

“Not telling you to do anything.” I pulled out the Nemex and ejected the half-spent magazine with actions almost as automatic as the smoking had been. The clip went into my jacket pocket. “I’m giving you the state of play. We’ll need somewhere to meet. Not the Hendrix. And not anywhere you can be traced to either. Don’t tell me, just write it down.” I nodded at the crowd beyond the barriers. “Anybody down there with decent implants could have this conversation focused and amped.”

“Jesus.” She blew out her cheeks. “That’s technoparanoia, Kovacs.”

“Don’t tell me that. I used to do this for a living.”

She thought about it for a moment, then produced a pen and scribbled on the side of the cigarette packet. I fished a fresh magazine from my pocket and jacked it into the Nemex, eyes still sca

“There you go.” Ortega tossed me the packet. “That’s a discreet destination code. Feed it to any taxi in the Bay area and it’ll take you there. I’ll be there tonight, tomorrow night. After that, it’s back to business as usual.”

I caught the packet left-handed, glanced briefly at the numbers and put it away in my jacket. Then I snapped the slide on the Nemex to chamber the first slug and stuffed the pistol back into its holster.

“Tell me that when you’ve checked the stack,” I said, and started walking.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I walked south.

Over my head, autocabs wove in and out of the traffic with programmed hyper-efficiency and swooped occasionally to ground level in attempts to stimulate custom. The weather above the traffic flow was on the change, grey cloud cover racing in from the west and occasional spots of rain hitting my cheek when I looked up. I left the cabs alone. Go primitive, Virginia Vidaura would have said. With an AI gu

I found a battered-looking currency dispenser and replenished my thi

There was no image. No sound of co

“Who is this?”

“You gave me your card,” I said, “in case of anything major. Well, now it seems there’s something pretty fucking major we need to talk about, doctor.”

There was an audible click as she swallowed, just once, and then her voice was there again, level and cool. “We should meet. I assume you don’t want to come to the facility.”

“You assume right. You know the red bridge?”

“The Golden Gate, it’s called,” she said dryly. “Yes, I’m familiar with it.”

“Be there at eleven. Northbound carriageway. Come alone.”

I cut the co

“Bancroft residence, with whom do you wish to speak?” A severely-suited woman with a hairstyle reminiscent of Angin Chandra’s pilot cuts arrived on the screen a fraction after she started speaking.

“Laurens Bancroft, please.”

“Mr. Bancroft is in conference at present.”

That made it even easier. “Fine. When he’s available, can you tell him Takeshi Kovacs called.”

“Would you like to speak to Mrs. Bancroft? She has left instructions that—”

“No,” I said rapidly. “That won’t be necessary. Please tell Mr. Bancroft that I shall be out of contact for a few days, but that I will call him from Seattle. That’s all.”

I cut the co