Altered Carbon

“Kovacs?” It was Rodrigo Bautista. “Is Ortega with you?”

“No.” I lied automatically. “Haven’t seen her for a couple of days. Is there a problem?”

“Ah, probably not. She’s vanished off the face of the planet again. Well, if you do see her, tell her she missed a squad assembly this afternoon and Captain Murawa wasn’t impressed.”

“Should I expect to see her?”

“With Ortega, who fucking knows?” Bautista spread his hands. “Look, I’ve got to go. See you around.”

“See you.” I watched as the screen blanked, and Ortega came back from her place by the wall. “Did you get that?”

“Yeah. I was supposed to turn the Hendrix memory discs over this morning. Murawa will probably want to know why I took them out of Fell Street in the first place.”

“It’s your case, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but there are norms.” Ortega looked suddenly tired. “I can’t stall them for long, Kovacs. I’m already getting a lot of fu

She raised her hands eloquently.

“Can’t you say you were held up? That Kadmin took the discs off you?”

“They’ll polygraph me—”

“Not immediately.”

“Kovacs, this is my career we’re flushing clown the toilet here, not yours. I don’t do this job for fun, it’s taken me—”

“Kristin, listen to me.” I went to her and took her hands in mine. “Do you want Ryker back, or not?”

She tried to turn away from me, but I held on.

“Kristin. Do you believe he was set up?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“Then why not believe it was Kawahara? The cruiser he tried to shoot down in Seattle was heading out over the ocean when it crashed. You extrapolate that heading and see where it takes you. You plot the point that the Coastals fished Mary Lou Hinchley out of the sea. Then put Head in the Clouds on the map and see if it all adds up to anything.”

Ortega pulled away from me with a strange look in her eyes.

“You want this to be true, don’t you? You want the excuse to go after Kawahara, no matter what. It’s just hate with you, isn’t it? Another score to settle. You don’t care about Ryker. You don’t even care about your friend, Sarah any—”

“Say that again,” I told her coldly, “and I’ll deck you. For your information, nothing that we’ve just discussed matters more to me than Sarah’s life. And nothing I’ve said means I have any option other than to do exactly what Kawahara wants.”

“Then what’s the fucking point?”

I wanted to reach out for her. Instead, I turned the yearning into a displacement gesture with both hands chopping gently at the air.

“I don’t know. Not yet. But if I can get Sarah clear, there might be a way to bring Kawahara down afterwards. And there might be a way to clear Ryker too. That’s all I’m saying.”

She stayed looking at me for a moment, then turned and swept up her jacket from the arm of the chair where she had draped it when we arrived.

“I’m going out for a while,” she said quietly.

“Fine.” I stayed equally quiet. This was not a moment for pressure. “I’ll be here, or I’ll leave a message for you if I have to go out.”

“Yes, do that.”

There was nothing in her voice to indicate whether she was really coming back or not.

After she had gone, I sat thinking for a while longer, trying to flesh out the glimpse of structure that the Envoy intuition had given me. When the phone chimed again, I had evidently given up, because the chime caught me staring out of the window, wondering where in Bay City Ortega had gone.

This time, it was Kawahara.

“I have what you want,” she said off-handedly. “A dormant version of the Rawling virus will be delivered to SilSet Holdings tomorrow morning after eight o’clock. Address 1187 Sacramento. They’ll know you’re coming.”

“And the activator codes?”

“Delivery under separate cover. Trepp will contact you.”

I nodded. UN law governing transfer and ownership of war viruses was clear to the point of bluntness. Inert viral forms could be owned as subjects for study, or even, as one bizarre test case had proved, private trophies. Ownership or sale of an active military virus, or the codes whereby a dormant virus could be activated, was a UN indictable offence, punishable with anything between a hundred and two hundred years’ storage. In the event of the virus actually being deployed, the sentence could be upped to erasure. Naturally these penalties were only applicable to private citizens, not military commanders or government executives. The powerful are jealous of their toys.

“Just make sure she contacts me soon,” I said briefly. “I don’t want to use up any more of my ten days than I have to.”

“I understand.” Kawahara made a sympathetic face, for all the world as if the threats against Sarah were being made by some malignant force of nature over which neither of us had control. “I will have Irene Elliott re-sleeved by tomorrow evening. Nominally, she is being bought out of storage by JacSol SA, one of my communications interface companies. You’ll be able to collect her from Bay City Central around ten o’clock. I have you temporarily accredited as a security consultant for JacSol Division West. Name, Martin Anderson.”

“Got it.” This was Kawahara’s way of telling me that if anything went wrong, I was tied to her and would go down first. “That’s going to clash with Ryker’s gene signature. He’ll be a live file at Bay City Central as long as the body’s decanted.”

Kawahara nodded. “Dealt with. Your accreditation will be routed through JacSol corporate cha

“What if I bump into Sullivan?”

“Warden Sullivan has gone on extended leave. Some kind of psychological problem. He is spending some time in virtual. You will not be seeing him again.”

Despite myself, I felt a cold shiver as I looked at Kawahara’s composed features. I cleared my throat.

“And the sleeve repurchase?”

“No.” Kawahara smiled faintly. “I checked the specs. Irene Elliott’s sleeve has no biotech augmentation to justify the cost of retrieving it.”

“I didn’t say it had. This isn’t about technical capacity, it’s about motivation. She’ll be more loyal if—”

Kawahara leant forward in the screen. “I can be pushed so far, Kovacs. And then it stops. Elliott’s getting a compatible sleeve, she should be thankful for that. You wanted her, any loyalty problems you have with her are going to be your problems exclusively. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“She’ll take longer to adjust,” I said doggedly. “In a new sleeve, she’ll be slower, less resp—”

“Also your problem. I offered you the best intrusion experts money can buy, and you turned them down. You’ve got to learn to live with the consequences of your actions, Kovacs.” She paused and sat back with another faint smile. “I had a check run on Elliott. Who she is, who her family are, what the co

“No.” I said flatly. “I suppose not.”

“No. And I think we can also suppose that this will be the last direct contact between us until this matter is resolved.”

“Yes.”

“Well, inappropriate though it may seem, good luck, Kovacs.”

The screen blanked, leaving the words hanging in the air. I sat for what seemed like a long time, hearing them, staring at an imagined afterimage on screen that my hate made almost real. When I spoke, Ryker’s voice sounded alien in my ears, as if someone or something else was speaking through me.

“Inappropriate is right,” it said into the quiet room. “Motherfucker.”