Altered Carbon(169)
“The perks of law enforcement, huh?”
Bautista turned round. “That ain’t funny, Kovacs.”
“Leave him alone, Rod,” said Ortega lazily. “Man’s entitled to a bad joke, under the circumstances. It’s just nerves.”
I raised one finger to my temple in acknowledgment of the point. Ortega peeled back the dermal gingerly and stood back.
“Three minutes till the next,” she said. “Right?”
I nodded complacently and opened my mind to the effects of the Reaper.
At first it was uncomfortable. As my body temperature started to fall, the air in the transport grew hot and oppressive. It sank humidly into my lungs and lay there, so that every breath became an effort. My vision smeared and my mouth turned uncomfortably dry as the fluid balance of my body seesawed. Movement, however small, began to seem like an imposition. Thought itself turned ponderous with effort.
Then the control stimulants kicked in and in seconds my head cleared from foggy to the unbearable brightness of sunlight on a knife. The soupy warmth of the air receded as neural governors retuned my system to cope with the body temperature shift. Inhaling became a languid pleasure, like drinking hot rum on a cold night. The cabin of the transport and the people in it were suddenly like a coded puzzle that I had the solution for if I could just …
I felt an inane grin eating its way across my features.
“Whoooh, Kristin, this is … good stuff. This is better than Sharya.”
“Glad you like it.” Ortega glanced at her watch. “Two more minutes. You up to it?”
“I’m up to.” I pursed my lips and blew through them. “Anything. Anything at all.”
Ortega tipped her head back towards Bautista, who could presumably see the instrumentation in the cockpit. “Rod. How long have we got?”
“Be there in less than forty minutes.”
“Better get him the suit.”
While Bautista busied himself with an overhead locker, Ortega delved in her pocket and produced a hypospray tipped with an unpleasant-looking needle.
“I want you to wear this,” she said. “Little bit of Organic Damage insurance for you.”
“A needle?” I shook my head with what felt like machined precision. “Uh-uh. You’re not sticking that fucking thing in me.”
“It’s a tracer filament,” she said patiently. “And you’re not leaving this ship without it.”
I looked at the gleam on the needle, mind slicing the facts like vegetables for a bowl of ramen. In the tactical marines we’d used subcutaneous filament to keep track of operatives on covert operations. In the event that something went wrong, it gave us a clear fix to pull our people out. In the event that nothing went wrong, the molecules of the filament broke down into organic residues, usually in under forty-eight hours.
I glanced across at Davidson.
“What’s the range?”
“Hundred klicks.” The young mohican seemed suddenly very competent in the glow from his screen. “Search-triggered signal only. It doesn’t radiate unless we call you. Quite safe.”
I shrugged. “OK. Where do you want to put it?”
Ortega stood up, needle in hand. “Neck muscles. Nice and close to your stack, case they chop your head off.”
“Charming.” I got to my feet and turned my back so that she could put the needle in. There was a brief spike of pain in the cords of muscle at the base of my skull and then it faded. Ortega patted me on the shoulder.
“You’re done. Is he on screen?”
Davidson punched a couple of buttons and nodded in satisfaction. In front of me, Bautista dumped the grav harness tackle on a seat. Ortega glanced at her watch and reached for the second dermal.
“Thirty-seven per cent,” she said. “Ready for the Big Chill?”
It was like being submerged in diamonds.
By the time we hit Head in the Clouds the drug had already eliminated most of my emotional responses and everything had the sharp and shiny edges of raw data. Clarity became a substance, a film of understanding that coated all I saw and heard around me. The stealth suit and the grav harness felt like samurai armour and when I drew the stungun from its sheath to check the settings, I could feel the charge coiled in it like a tangible thing.
It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.
The shard pistol, spider venom loaded, snugged across my lower ribs opposite the stunner. I dialled the muzzle aperture to wide. At five metres, it would take down a roomful of opponents with a single shot, with no recoil and in complete silence. Sarah Sachilowska says Hi.
The dispenser clip of termite microgrenades, each one not much larger or thicker than a data diskette, secured in a pouch on my left hip. In memoriam Iphigenia Deme.