Altered Carbon
an extract from the novel
by Richard Morgan
PROLOGUE
Two hours before dawn I sat in the peeling kitchen and smoked
one of Sarah's cigarettes, listening to the maelstrom and waiting. Millsport
had long since put itself to bed, but out in the Reach  currents
were still snagging on the shoals, and the sound came ashore to prowl
the empty streets. There was a fine mist drifting in from the whirlpool,
falling on the city like sheets of muslin and fogging the kitchen windows.
Chemically alert, I inventoried the hardware on the scarred wooden
table for the fiftieth time that night. Sarah's Heckler & Koch shard
pistol glinted dully at me in the low light, the but gaping open for
its clip. It was an assassin's weapon, compact and utterly silent. The
magazines lay next to it. She had wrapped insulating tape around each
one to distinguish the ammunition; green for sleep, black for the spider
venom load. Most of the clips were black-wrapped. Sarah had used up
a lot of green on the security guards at Gemini Biosys the previous
night.
My own contributions were less subtle. The big silver Smith & Wesson,
and the four remaining hallucinogen grenades. The thin crimson line
around each canister seemed to sparkle slightly, as if it were about
to detach itself from the metal casing and float up to join the curlicues
of smoke ribboning off my cigarette. Shift and slide of altered significants,
the side effect of the tetrameth I'd scored that afternoon down at the
wharf. I don't usually smoke when I'm straight, but for some reason
the tet always triggers the urge.
Against the distant roar of the maelstrom I heard it. The hurrying
strop of rotorblades on the fabric of the night.
I stubbed out the cigarette, mildly unimpressed with myself, and went
through to the bedroom. Sarah was sleeping, an assembly of low-frequency
sine curves beneath the single sheet. A raven sweep of hair covered
her face and one long-fingered hand trailed over the side of the bed.
As I stood looking at her the night outside split. One of Harlan's World's
orbital guardians test-firing into the Reach. Thunder from the concussed
sky rolled in to rattle the windows. The woman in the bed stirred and
swept the hair out of her eyes. The liquid crystal gaze found me and
locked on.
"What're you looking at?" Voice husky with the residue of sleep.
I smiled a little.
"Don't give me that shit. Tell me what you're looking at."
"Just looking. It's time to go."
She lifted her head and picked up the sound of the helicopter. The
sleep slid away from her face and she sat up in bed.
"Where's the 'ware?"
It was a Corps joke. I smiled, the way you do when you see an old friend,
and pointed to the case in the corner of the room.
"Get my gun for me."
"Yes ma'am. Black or green?"
"Black. I trust these scumbags about as far as a clingfilm condom."
In the kitchen, I loaded up the shard pistol, cast a glance at my own
weapon and left it lying there. Instead, I scooped up one of the H grenades
and took it back in my other hand. I paused in the doorway to the bedroom
and weighted the two pieces of hardware in each palm as if I was trying
to decide which was the heavier.
"A little something with your phallic substitute, ma'am?"
Sarah looked up from beneath the hanging sickle of black hair over
her forehead. She was in the midst of pulling a pair of long woollen
socks up over the sheen of her thighs.
"Yours is the one with the long barrel, Tak."
"Size isn't--"
We both heard it at the same time. A metallic double clack from
the corridor outside. Our eyes met across the room and for a quarter
second I saw my own shock mirrored there. Then I was tossing the loaded
shard gun to her. She put up one hand and took it out of the air just
as the whole of the bedroom wall caved in in thunder. The blast knocked
me back into a corner and onto the floor.
They must have located us in the apartment with body-heat sensors,
then mined the whole wall with limpets. Taking no chances this time.
The commando that came through the ruined wall was stocky and insect-eyed
in full gas attack rig, hefting a snub-barrelled Kalashnikov in gloved
hands.
Ears ringing, still on the floor, I flung the H grenade up at him.
It was unfused, useless in any case against the gas mask, but he didn't
have time to identify the device as it spun at him. He batted it off
the breech of his Kalashnikov and stumbled back, eyes wide behind the
glass panels of the mask.
"Fire in the hole."
Sarah was down on the floor beside the bed, arms wrapped around her
head and sheltered from the blast. She heard the shout and in the seconds
the bluff had bought us she popped up again, shard gun outflung. Beyond
the wall I could see figures huddled against the expected grenade blast.
I heard the mosquito whine of monomolecular splinters across the room
as she put three shots into the lead commando. They shredded invisibly
through the attack suit and into the flesh beneath. He made a noise
like someone straining to lift something heavy as the spider venom sank
its claws into his nervous system. I grinned and started to get up.
Sarah was turning her aim on the figures beyond the wall when the second
commando of the night appeared braced in the kitchen doorway and hosed
her away with his assault rifle.
Still on my knees, I watched her die with chemical clarity. It all
went so slowly it was like a video playback on frame advance. The commando
kept his aim low, holding the Kalashnikov down against the hyper-rapid-fire
recoil it was famous for. The bed went first, erupting into gouts of
white goosedown and ripped cloth, then Sarah, caught in the storm as
she turned. I saw one leg turned to pulp below the knee, and then the
body hits, bloody fistfuls of tissue torn out of her pale flanks as
she fell through the curtain of fire.
I reeled to my feet as the assault rifle stammered to a halt. Sarah
had rolled over on her face, as if to hide the damage the shells had
done to her, but I saw it all through veils of red anyway. I came out
of the corner without conscious thought, and the commando was too late
to bring the Kalashnikov around. I slammed into him at waist height,
blocked the gun and knocked him back into the kitchen. The barrel of
the rifle caught on the door jamb and he lost his grip. I heard the
weapon clatter to the ground behind me as we hit the kitchen floor.
With the speed and strength of the tetrameth I scrambled astride him,
batted aside one flailing arm and seized his head in both hands. Then
I smashed it against the tiles like a coconut.
Under the mask, his eyes went suddenly unfocused. I lifted the head
again and smashed it down again, feeling the skull give soggily with
the impact. I ground down against the crunch, lifted and smashed again.
There was a roaring in my ears like the maelstrom and somewhere I could
hear my own voice screaming obscenities. I was going for a fourth or
fifth blow when something kicked me between the shoulder blades and
splinters jumped magically out of the table leg in front of me. I felt
the sting as two of them found homes in my face.
For some reason the rage puddled abruptly out of me. I let go of the
commando's head almost gently and was lifting one puzzled hand to the
pain of the splinters in my cheek when I realised I had been shot, and
that the bullet must have torn all the way through my chest and into
the table leg. I looked down, dumbfounded, and saw the dark red stain
inking its way out over my shirt. No doubt about it. An exit hole big
enough to take a golf ball.
With the realisation came the pain. It felt as if someone had run a
steel-wool pipe-cleaner briskly through my chest cavity. Almost thoughtfully,
I reached up, found the hole and plugged it with my two middle fingers.
The finger tips scraped over the roughness of torn bone in the wound,
and I felt something membranous throb against one of them. The bullet
had missed my heart. I grunted and attempted to rise, but the grunt
turned into a cough and I tasted blood on my tongue.
"Don't move, motherfucker."
The yell came out of a young throat, badly distorted with shock. I
hunched forward over my wound and looked back over my shoulder. Behind
me in the doorway, a young man in a police uniform had both hands clasped
around the pistol he had just shot me with. He was trembling visibly.
I coughed again and turned back to the table.
The Smith & Wesson was at eye level, gleaming silver, still where
I had left it less than two minutes before. Perhaps it was that, the
scant shavings of time that had been planed off since Sarah was alive
and all was well, that drove me. Less than two minutes ago I could have
picked up the gun, I'd even thought about it, so why not now. I gritted
my teeth, pressed my fingers harder into the hole in my chest and staggered
upright. Blood spattered warmly against the back of my throat. I braced
myself on the edge of the table with my free hand and looked back at
the cop. I could feel my lips peeling back from the clenched teeth in
something that was more a grin than a grimace.
"Don't make me do it, Kovacs."
I got myself a step closer to the table and leaned against it with
my thighs, breath whistling through my teeth and bubbling in my throat.
The Smith & Wesson gleamed like fool's gold on the scarred wood.
Out in the Reach power lashed down from an orbital and lit the kitchen
in tones of blue. I could hear the maelstrom calling.
"I said don't--"
I closed my eyes and clawed the gun off the table.
CHAPTER ONE
Coming back from the dead can be rough.
In the Envoy Corps they teach you to let go before storage. Stick it
in neutral and float. It's the first lesson and the trainers drill it
into you from day one. Hard-eyed Virginia Vidaura, dancer's body poised
inside the shapeless Corps coveralls as she paced in front of us in
the induction room. Don't worry about anything, she said, and
you'll be ready for it. A decade later, I met her again, in a holding
pen at the New Kanagawa justice facility. She was going down for eighty
to a century; excessively armed robbery and organic damage. The last
thing she said to me when they walked her out of the cell was: "Don't
worry kid, they'll store it." Then she bent her head to light a
cigarette, drew the smoke hard into lungs she no longer gave a damn
about and set off down the corridor as if to a tedious briefing. From
the narrow angle of vision afforded me by the cell gate, I watched the
pride in that walk and I whispered the words to myself like a mantra.
Don't worry, they'll store it. It was a superbly double-edged
piece of street wisdom. Bleak faith in the efficiency of the penal system,
and a clue to the elusive state of mind required to steer you past the
rocks of psychosis. Whatever you feel, whatever you're thinking, whatever
you are when they store you, that's what you'll be when you come out.
With states of high anxiety, that can be a problem. So you let go. Stick
it in neutral. Disengage and float.
If you have time.
I came thrashing up out of the tank, one hand plastered across my chest
searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a non-existent weapon.
The weight hit me like a hammer and I collapsed back into the flotation
gel. I flailed with my arms, caught one elbow painfully on the side
of the tank and gasped. Gobbets of gel poured into my mouth and down
my throat. I snapped my mouth shut and got a hold on the hatch coaming,
but the stuff was everywhere. In my eyes, burning my nose and throat,
and slippery under my fingers. The weight was forcing my grip on the
hatch loose, sitting on my chest like a high-g manoeuvre, pressing me
down into the gel. My body heaved violently in the confines of the tank.
Flotation gel? I was drowning.
Abruptly, there was a strong grip on my arm and I was hauled coughing
into an upright position. At about the same time I was working out there
were no wounds in my chest, someone wiped a towel roughly across my
face and I could see. I decided to save that pleasure for later and
concentrated on getting the contents of the tank out of my nose and
throat. For about half a minute I stayed sitting, head down, coughing
out the gel and trying to work out why everything weighed so much.
"So much for training." It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually
hangs around justice facilities. "What did they teach you in the Envoys
anyway, Kovacs?"
That was when I had it. On Harlan's World, Kovacs is quite a common
name. Everyone knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn't. He was speaking
a stretched form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing
for that he was mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with
a hard "k" instead of the slavic "ch".
And everything was too heavy.
The realisation came through my fogged perceptions like a brick through
frosted plate glass.
Offworld.
Somewhere along the line, they'd taken Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.), and they'd
freighted him. And since Harlan's World was the only habitable biosphere
in the Glimmer system that meant a stellar range needlecast to --
Where?
I looked up. Harsh neon tubes set in a concrete roof. I was sitting
in the opened hatch of a dull metal cylinder, looking for all the world
like an ancient aviator who'd forgotten to dress before climbing aboard
his biplane. The cylinder was one of a row of about twenty backed up
against the wall, opposite a heavy steel door which was closed. The
air was chilly and the walls unpainted. Give them their due, on Harlan's
World at least the re-sleeving rooms are decked out in pastel colours
and the attendants are pretty. After all, you're supposed to have paid
your debt to society. The least they can do is give you a sunny start
to your new life.
Sunny wasn't in the vocabulary of the figure before me. About two metres
tall, he looked as if he'd made his living wrestling swamp panthers
before the present career opportunity presented itself. Musculature
bulged on his chest and arms like body armour and the head above it
was cropped close to the skull, revealing a long scar like a lightning
strike down to the left ear. He was dressed in a loose black garment
with epaulettes and a diskette logo on the breast. His eyes matched
the garment and watched me with hardened calm. Having helped me sit
up, he had stepped back out of arm's reach, as per the manual. He'd
been doing this a long time.
I pressed one nostril closed and snorted tank gel out of the other.
"Want to tell me where I am? Itemise my rights, something like that?"
"Kovacs, right now you don't have any rights."
I looked up and saw that a grim smile had stitched itself across his
face. I shrugged and snorted the other nostril clean.
"Want to tell me where I am?"
He hesitated a moment, glanced up at the neon-barred roof as if to
ascertain the information for himself before he passed it on, and then
mirrored my shrug.
"Sure. Why not? You're in Bay City, pal. Bay City, Earth." The grimace
of a smile came back. "Home of the Human Race. Please enjoy your stay
on this most ancient of civilised worlds. Ta-dada-DAH."
"Don't give up the day job," I told him soberly.
...continues in the print edition
© Richard Morgan 2002, 2003.
Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon was published in 2002 by Gollancz.
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