Altered Carbon

“You arrogant motherfucker.” The coffee cup thumped dully to the carpet, and her fists clenched. Now there was real fury in her eyes. “You’re just like him, you’re just fucking like him. You think we need the nicking clinic, with footage of you putting a severed head in a hotel freezer. Isn’t that a crime where you come from, Kovacs? Summary decapitation—”

“Wait a minute.” I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. “Just like who, who am I just like?”

“What?”

“You just said I’m just—”

“Never fucking mind what I said. Do you understand what you’ve done here, Kovacs?”

“The only thing I under—” Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind me, liquid groans and the sound of organic suction. I glanced at the remote clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I’d inadvertently unfrozen the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitching through my guts. Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.

“Give me that, turn that fucking thing—”

For a moment I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume louder. Then, suddenly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.

“—off.”

There was a long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped between my leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that, for a moment, our breathing matched pace.

When I turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.

It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off, sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer’s shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega’s hands tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard, long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each finger, rubbing.

Somehow we got out of the room with the screen, and made it to the stern-end cabin I’d seen earlier. I followed the taut sway of Ortega’s strides across the room between, the muscled lines of the long thighs, and it must have been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home. There, in the room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted herself up and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid entirety of hot bath water, and the heated globes of her buttocks branded my hips with the impact of each stroke. Ahead of me, her spine lifted and wove like a snake and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. In the mirrors around me I saw Ryker reaching forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the rounding of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around the ship. Ryker and Ortega, writhing against each other like the reunited lovers of a timeless epic.

I felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own control and moulded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms were all spent inside her and we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. The ship ploughed on its automated way and around us the dangerous cold of the mirrors lapped inwards like an icy tide, threatening to tinge, and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be fixing our gazes carefully outwards on the images of ourselves, instead of on each other.

I slid an arm around Ortega’s flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.

“Where’re we going?” I asked her gently.

A shrug, but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. “Programmed cycle, down the coast, out to Hawaii, hook around and then back.”

“And no one knows we’re out here?”

“Only the satellites.”

“Nice thought. Who does it all belong to it?”

She twisted to look at me over her shoulder. “It’s Ryker’s.”

“Ooops.” I looked elaborately away. “Nice carpet in here.”

Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed. Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.

“I told myself,” she murmured, “it was crazy. It was just the body, you know.”

“Most things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff. Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine tuning. Sad, but true.”

Her finger followed a line down the side of my face. “I don’t think it’s sad. What we’ve done with the rest of ourselves, that’s sad.”

“Kristin Ortega.” I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. “You are a real fucking Luddite, aren’t you. How in God’s name did you get into this line of work?”

She shrugged again. “Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grandmother was a cop. You know how it goes.”

“Not from experience.”

“No.” She stretched one long leg languidly up towards the mirrored ceiling. “I guess not.”

I reached across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.

This time, when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we’d shared since reaching the bed.

We moved slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness to her own shaking finish.

In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.

As we separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts pressed into my back, an arm draped over me and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing down.