Altered Carbon(180)

Kawahara’s voice came through faintly. She must be in the other room, beyond the arch. “They coming?”

Trepp’s face stayed impassive. Her eyes lifted from me. “Yeah,” she said loudly. “Be here in a couple of minutes.”

I was coming back. Something was forcing my nerves back into sparking, fizzing life. I could feel the shakes setting in, and with them a soupy, suffocating quality to the air in my lungs that meant the betathanatine crash was coming on ahead of schedule. My limbs were moulded in lead and my hands felt as if I was wearing thick cotton gloves with a low electric current fizzing through them. I was in no condition for a fight.

My left hand was folded under me, flattened to the floor by the weight of my body. My right trailed out at an awkward side angle. It didn’t feel as if my legs would do much more than hold me up. My options were limited.

“Right then.” I felt Kawahara’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me onto my back like a fish for gutting. Her face was masked in concentration and there was a pair of needle-nosed pliers in her other hand. She knelt astride my chest and spread the lids of my left eye with her fingers. I forced down the urge to blink, held myself immobile. The pliers came down, jaws poised a half centimetre apart.

I tensed the muscles in my forearm, and the neural spring harness delivered the Tebbit knife into my hand.

I slashed sideways.

I was aiming for Kawahara’s side, below the floating ribs, but the combination of stun shakes and betathanatine crash threw me off and the knife blade sliced into her left arm below the elbow, jarred on the bone and bounced off. Kawahara yelled and released her grip on my eye. The pliers plunged down, off course, hit my cheekbone and carved a trough in the flesh of my cheek. I felt the pain distantly, metal snagging tissue. Blood spilled down into my eye. I stabbed again, weakly, but this time Kawahara twisted astride me and blocked downward with her injured arm. She yelled again and my fizzing glove grip on the knife slipped. The haft trickled away past my palm and the weapon was gone. Summoning all my remaining energy into my left arm, I hooked a savage punch up from the floor and caught Kawahara on the temple. She rolled off me, clutching at the wound in her arm, and for a moment I thought the blade had gone deep enough to mark her with the C-381 coating. But Sheila Sorenson had told me that the cyanide poisoning would do its work in the time it takes to draw a couple of breaths.

Kawahara was getting up.

“What the fuck are you waiting for?” she enquired acidly of Trepp. “Shoot this piece of shit, will you?”

Her voice died on the last word as she saw the truth in Trepp’s face an instant before the pale woman went for her holstered stungun. Maybe it was a truth that was only dawning on Trepp herself at that moment, because she was slow. Kawahara dropped the pliers, cleared both shard gun and stunner from her belt with a snap and levelled them before Trepp’s weapon was even halfway out of the holster.

“You traitorous fucking cunt,” Kawahara spat out wonderingly, her voice suddenly streaked through with a coarse accent I had never heard before. “You knew he was coming round, didn’t you? You’re fucking dead, bitch.”

I staggered upright and lurched into Kawahara just as she pulled the triggers. I heard both weapons discharge, the almost supra-aural whine of the shard gun and the sharp electrical splatter of the stunner. Through the fogged vision in the corner of one eye, I saw Trepp make a desperate bid to complete her draw and not even come close. She went down, face almost comically surprised. At the same time my shoulder smashed into Kawahara and we stumbled back towards the slope of the windows. She tried to shoot me but I flailed the guns aside with my arms and tripped her. She hooked at me with her injured arm and we both went down on the angled glass.

The stunner was gone, skittering across the floor, but she’d managed to hang on to the shard gun. It swung round at me and I batted it down clumsily. My other hand punched at Kawahara’s head, missed and bounced off her shoulder. She grinned fiercely and headbutted me in the face. My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery and blood flooded down over my mouth. From somewhere I suffered an insane desire to taste it. Then Kawahara was on me, twisting me back against the glass and punching solidly into my body. I blocked one or two of the punches, but the strength was puddling out of me and the muscles in my arms were losing interest. Things started to go numb inside. Above me Kawahara’s face registered a savage triumph as she saw that the fight was over. She hit me once more, with great care, in the groin. I convulsed and slid down the glass into a sprawled heap on the floor.

“That ought to hold you, sport,” she grated, and jerked herself back to her feet, breathing heavily. Beneath the barely disarrayed elegance of her hair, I suddenly saw the face that this new accent belonged to. The brutal satisfaction in that face was what her victims in Fission City must have seen as she made them drink from the dull grey flask of the water carrier. “You just lie there for a moment.”