Altered Carbon

“Trepp?”

“Good guess. You going to let me sit down?”

I waved the Philips gun at the seat opposite, where Sullivan was cupping both hands to his eye. “If you can persuade your associate here to move over. Just keep your hands above the table.”

The woman smiled and inclined her head. She glanced at Sullivan, who was already squeezing up to the wall to make space for her, and then, keeping her hands poised at her sides, she swung herself elegantly in beside him. The economy of motion was so tight that her pendant earring barely shifted. Once seated, she pressed both hands palm down on the table in front of her.

“That make you feel safer?”

“It’ll do,” I said, noticing that the black glass rings, like the earring, were a body joke. Each ring showed, X-ray like, a ghostly blue section of the bones in the fingers beneath. Trepp’s style, at least, I could get to like.

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Sullivan blurted.

“You didn’t know anything worth a jack,” said Trepp disinterestedly. She hadn’t even turned to look at him. “Lucky for you I turned up, I’d say. Mr. Kovacs doesn’t look like someone ready to take ‘don’t know’ for an answer. Am I right?”

“What do you want, Trepp?”

“Come to help out.” Trepp glanced up as something rattled in the restaurant. The waiter had arrived bearing a tray with a large teapot and two handleless cups. “You order this?”

“Yeah. Help yourself.”

“Thanks, I love this stuff.” Trepp waited while the waiter deposited everything, then busied herself with the teapot. “Sullivan, you want a cup too? Hey, bring him another cup, would you. Thanks. Now, where was I?”

“You’d come to help out,” I said pointedly.

“Yeah.” Trepp sipped at the green tea and looked at me over the rim of the cup. “That’s right. I’m here to clarify things. See, you’re trying to hammer the information out of Sullivan here. And he doesn’t know fuck all. His contact was me, so here I am. Talk to me.”

I looked at her levelly. “I killed you last week, Trepp.”

“Yeah, so they tell me.” Trepp set down the tea cup and looked critically at her own fingerbones. “ ‘Course, I don’t remember that. In fact, I don’t even know you, Kovacs. Last thing I remember was putting myself into the tank about a month back. Everything after that’s gone. The me you torched in that cruiser, she’s dead. That wasn’t me. So, no hard feelings, huh?”

“No remote storage, Trepp?”

She snorted. “Are you kidding? I make a living doing this, same as you, but not that much. Anyway, who needs that remote shit? The way I figure it, you fuck up, you’ve got to pay some kind of tab for it. I fucked up with you, right?”

I sipped my own tea and played back the fight in the aircar, considering the angles. “You were a little slow,” I conceded. “A little careless.”

“Yeah, careless. I got to watch that. Wearing artificials makes you that way. Very anti-Zen. I got a sensei in New York, it drives him up the fucking wall.”

“That’s too bad,” I said patiently. “You want to tell me who sent you now?”

“Hey, better than that. You’re invited to meet the Man.” She nodded at my expression. “Yeah, Ray wants to talk to you. Same as last time, except this is a voluntary ride. Seems coercion doesn’t work too well with you.”

“And Kadmin? He in on this as well?”

Trepp drew breath in through her teeth. “Kadmin’s, well, Kadmin’s a bit of a side issue right now. Bit of an embarrassment really. But I think we can deal on that as well. I really can’t tell you too much more now.” She shuttled her glance sideways at Sullivan, who was begi

“All right.” I nodded. “I’ll follow you out. But let’s have a couple of ground rules before we go. One, no virtuals.”

“Way ahead of you there.” Trepp finished her tea and started to get up from the table. “My instructions are to convey you directly to Ray. In the flesh.”

I put a hand on her arm and she stopped moving abruptly.

“Two. No surprises. You tell me exactly what’s going to happen well before it does. Anything unexpected, and you’re likely to be disappointing your sensei all over again.”

“Fine. No surprises.” Trepp produced a slightly forced smile that told me she wasn’t accustomed to being grabbed by the arm. “We’re going to walk out of the restaurant and catch a taxi. That all right by you?”

“Just so long as it’s empty.” I released her arm and she resumed motion, coming fluidly upright, hands still well away from her sides. I reached into my pocket and tossed a couple of plastic notes at Sullivan. “You stay here. If I see your face come through the door before we’re gone, I’ll put a hole in it. Tea’s on me.”

As I followed Trepp to the door, the waiter arrived with Sullivan’s tea cup and a big white handkerchief, presumably for the warden’s smashed lip. Nice kid. He practically tripped over himself trying to stay out of my way, and the look he gave me was mingled disgust and awe. In the wake of the icy fury that had possessed me earlier, I sympathised more than he could have known.

The young men in silk watched us go with the dead-eyed concentration of snakes.

Outside, it was still raining. I turned up my collar and watched as Trepp produced a transport pager and waved it casually back and forth above her head. “Be a minute,” she said, and gave me a curious sidelong glance. “You know who that place belongs to?”

“I guessed.”

She shook her head. “Triad noodle house. Hell of a place for an interrogation. Or do you just like living dangerously?”

I shrugged. “Where I come from, criminals stay out of other people’s fights. They’re a gutless lot, generally. Much more likely to get interference from a solid citizen.”

“Not around here. Most solid citizens around here are a little too solid to get involved in a brawl on some stranger’s behalf. The way they figure it, that’s what the police are for. You’re from Harlan’s World, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe it’s that Quellist thing, then. You reckon?”

“Maybe.”

An autocab came spiralling down through the rain in response to the pager. Trepp stood aside at the open hatch and made an irony of demonstrating the empty compartment within. I smiled thinly.

“After you.”

“Suit yourself.” She climbed aboard and moved over to let me in. I settled back on the seat opposite her and watched her hands. When she saw where I was looking, she gri

“Welcome to Urbline services,” said the cab smoothly. “Please state your destination.”

“Airport,” said Trepp, lounging back in her seat and looking for my reaction. “Private carriers’ terminal.”

The cab lifted. I looked past Trepp at the rain on the rear window. “Not a local trip, then,” I said tonelessly.

She brought her arms in again, hands held palm upward. “Well, we figured you wouldn’t go virtual, so now we have to do it the hard way. Sub-orbital. Take about three hours.”

“Sub-orbital?” I drew a deep breath and touched the bolstered Philips gun lightly. “You know, I’m going to get really upset if someone asks me to check this hardware before we fly.”

“Yeah, we figured that too. Relax Kovacs, you heard me say private terminal. This is a custom flight, just for you. Carry a fucking tactical nuke on board if you like. OK?”

“Where are we going, Trepp?”

She smiled.

“Europe,” she said.