Altered Carbon

“Where the fuck have you been?” snapped Ortega.

I took a moment to rub some of the water out of my hair and looked around. If this was a rich man’s floating home, the rich man in question hadn’t been home in a while. Furniture was stowed at the sides of the room I had descended into, sheeted over in semi-opaque plastic, and the shelves of the small niche bar were empty. The hatches over the windows were all battened down. Doors at either end of the room were open onto what seemed to be similarly mothballed spaces.

For all that, the yacht reeked of the wealth that had spawned it. The chairs and tables beneath the plastic were darkly polished wood, as was the panelling of the bulkheads and doors, and there were rugs on the waxed boards beneath my feet. The remainder of the décor was similarly sombre in tone, with what looked like original artwork on the bulkhead walls. One from the Empathist school, the skeletal ruins of a Martian shipyard at sunset, the other an abstract that I didn’t have the cultural background to read.

Ortega stood in the middle of it all, tousle-haired and scowling in a raw silk kimono that I assumed had come out of an onboard wardrobe.

“It’s a long story.” I moved past her to peer through the nearest door. “I could use a coffee, if the galley’s open.”

Bedroom. A big, oval bed set amidst less than wholly tasteful mirrors, quilt tangled and thrown aside in haste. I was moving back towards the other door when she slapped me.

I reeled sideways. It wasn’t as hard a blow as I’d given Sullivan in the noodle house, but it was delivered from standing with a lot more swing and there was the tilt of the deck to contend with. The cocktail of hangover and painkillers didn’t help. I didn’t quite go down, but it was a near thing. Stumbling back into balance, I raised a hand to my cheek and stared at Ortega, who was glaring back at me with twin spots of colour burning high on each cheekbone.

“Look, I’m sorry if I woke you up, but—”

“You piece of shit,” she hissed at me. “You lying piece of shit.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“I should have you fucking arrested, Kovacs. I should have you fucking stacked for what you’ve done.”

I started to lose my temper. “Done what? Will you get a fucking grip, Ortega, and tell me what’s going on.”

“We accessed the Hendrix’s memory today,” Ortega said coldly. “Preliminary warrant went through at noon. Everything for the last week. I’ve been reviewing it.”

The rapidly flaring, irritable rage shrank back to nothing inside me as the words left her mouth. It was as if she’d emptied a bucket of seawater over my head.

“Oh.”

“Yes, there wasn’t much.” Ortega turned away, hugging her own shoulders in the kimono, and moved past me to the unexplored doorway. “You’re the only guest there at the moment. So it’s just been you. And your visitors.”

I followed her through into a second, carpeted room where two steps led down to a narrow sunken galley behind a low, wood-panelled partition at one side. The other walls held similarly covered items of furniture to the first room, except for the far corner, where the plastic sheeting had been pulled off a metre-square video screen and attendant receiver/playback modules. A single, straight-backed chair was positioned in front of the screen on which was frozen the unmistakable image of Elias Ryker’s face delving between Miriam Bancroft’s widespread thighs.

“There’s a remote on the chair,” said Ortega, herself remote. “Why don’t you watch some of it while I make you a coffee? Refresh your memory. Then you can do some explaining.”

She disappeared into the galley without giving me the chance to reply. I advanced on the frozen video screen, feeling a small liquid slide in my guts as the image brought back memories tinged with Merge Nine. In the sleepless, chaotic whirl of the last day and a half, I had all but forgotten Miriam Bancroft, but now she came back to me in the flesh, overpowering and intoxicating as she had been that night. I’d also forgotten Rodrigo Bautista’s claim that they were almost through the legal wrangles with the Hendrix’s lawyers.

My foot knocked against something and I looked down at the carpet. There was a coffee mug on the floor next to the chair, still a third full. I wondered how much of the hotel’s memory Ortega had gone through. I glanced at the image on screen. Was this as far as she’d got? What else had she seen? How to play this, then? I picked up the remote and turned it over in my hands. Ortega’s cooperation had been an integral part of my pla

Scratching around inside me was something else. An emotional upwelling that I didn’t want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would be a clinical absurdity. A feeling that, despite my preoccupation with later factors in the hotel’s memory, was tied intimately to the image currently on screen.

Embarrassment. Shame.

Absurd. I shook my head. Fucking stupid.

“You’re not watching.”

I turned back and saw Ortega with a steaming mug in each hand. An aroma of mingled coffee and rum wafted towards me.

“Thanks.” I took one of the mugs from her and sipped at it, playing for time. She leaned away from me and folded her arms.

“So. Half a hundred reasons why Miriam Bancroft doesn’t fit the bill.” She jerked her head at the screen. “How many of them is that?”

“Ortega, this is nothing to do—”

“I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary, you told me.” She shook her head judicially and sipped from her coffee. “I don’t know, that doesn’t look like fear on your face, exactly.”

“Ortega—”

“ ‘I want you to stop,’ she says. She actually says it, look wind it back if you don’t rememb—”

I pulled the remote out of her reach. “I remember what she said.”

“Then you also remember the sweet little deal she offered you to shut down the case, the multiple—”

“Ortega, you didn’t want me on the case either, remember. Open and shut suicide, you said. That doesn’t mean you killed him, does—”

“Shut up.” Ortega circled me as if we were holding knives, not coffee mugs. “You’ve been covering for her. All this fucking time, you’ve had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful fucking d—”

“If you’ve seen the rest of it, you know that isn’t true.” I tried for an even tone that Ryker’s hormones would not let me have. “I told Curtis I wasn’t interested. I fucking told him that two days ago.”

“Do you have any idea what a prosecutor will do with this footage? Miriam Bancroft trying to buy off her husband’s investigator with illegal sexual favours. Oh yes, admission of multiple sleeving, even unproven, can be made to look very bad in court.”

“She’ll beat the rap. You know she will.”

“If her Meth husband wants to weigh in on her side. Which maybe he won’t when he sees this. This isn’t Leila Begin again, you know. The moral boot’s on the other foot this time around.”

The allusion to morality went ripping through the outer borders of the argument, but as it passed I grasped the uncomfortable fact that actually it was central to what was going on here. I remembered Bancroft’s critical assessment of Earth’s moral culture, and wondered if he could really watch my head between his wife’s thighs and not feel betrayed.

I was still trying to work out what I felt on the same subject.

“And while we’re on the subject of prosecution, Kovacs, that severed head you brought back from the Wei Clinic isn’t going to win you any remissions either. Illegal retention of a d.h. personality carries fifty to a hundred on Earth, more if we can prove you torched the head off in the first place.”

“I was going to tell you about that.”

“No, you fucking weren’t,” Ortega snarled. “You weren’t going to fucking tell me any single thing you didn’t need to.”

“Look, the clinic won’t dare prosecute anyway. They’ve got too much to—”