Altered Carbon(181)

My body told me that I didn’t have any other option. I felt drenched in damage, sinking fast under the weight of the chemicals silting up my system and the shivering neural invasion of the stun bolt. I tried to lift one arm and it flopped back down like a fish with a kilo of lead in its guts. Kawahara saw it happen and grinned.

“Yeah, that’ll do nicely,” she said and looked absently down at her own left arm, where blood was trickling from the rent in her blouse. “You’re going to fucking pay for that, Kovacs.”

She walked across to Trepp’s motionless form. “And you, you fuck,” she said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move. “What did this motherfucker do for you, anyway? Promise to eat your cunt for the next decade?”

Trepp made no response. I strained the fingers of my left hand and managed to move them a few centimetres across the floor towards my leg. Kawahara went to the desk with a final backward glance at Trepp’s body and touched a control.

“Security?”

“Ms. Kawahara.” It was the same male voice that had grilled Ortega on our approach to the airship. “There’s been an incursion on the—”

“I know what there’s been,” said Kawahara tiredly. “I’ve been wrestling with it for the last five minutes. Why aren’t you down here?”

“Ms. Kawahara?”

“I said, how long does it take you to get your synthetic ass down here on a call out?”

There was a brief silence. Kawahara waited, head bowed over the desk. I reached across my body and my right and left hands met in a weak clasp, then curled closed on what they held and fell back.

“Ms. Kawahara, there was no alert from your cabin.”

“Oh.” Kawahara turned back to look at Trepp. “OK, well get someone down here now. Squad of four. There’s some garbage to take out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In spite of everything, I felt a smile crawl onto my mouth. Ma’am?

Kawahara came back, scooping the pliers up off the floor on her way. “What are you grinning at, Kovacs?”

I tried to spit at her, but the saliva barely made it out of my mouth and hung in a thick streamer over my jaw, mingled with the blood. Kawahara’s face distorted with sudden rage and she kicked me in the stomach. On top of everything else, I barely felt it.

“You,” she began savagely, then forced the level of her voice back down to an accentless icy calm, “have caused more than enough trouble for one lifetime.”

She took hold of my collar and dragged me up the angled slope of the window until we were at eye level. My head lolled back on the glass and she leaned over me. Her tone eased back, almost to conversational.

“Like the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw material—that’s all you’ve ever been. You could have evolved beyond it and joined me on New Beijing, but you spat in my face and went back to your little people existence. You could have joined us again, here on Earth, joined in the steerage of the whole human race this time. You could have been a man of power, Kovacs. Do you understand that? You could have been significant.”

“I don’t think so,” I murmured weakly, starting to slide back down the glass. “I’ve still got a conscience rattling around in here somewhere. Just forgotten where I put it.”

Kawahara grimaced and redoubled her hold on my collar. “Very witty. Spirited. You’re going to need that, where you’re going.”

“When they ask how I died,” I said, “tell them: still angry.”

“Quell.” Kawahara leaned closer. She was almost lying on top of me now, like a sated lover. “But Quell never went into virtual interrogation, did she? You aren’t going to die angry, Kovacs. You’re going to die pleading. Over. And over. Again.”

She shifted her hold to my chest and pressed me down hard. The pliers came up.

“Have an aperitif.”

The jaws of the tool plunged into the underside of my eye and a spurt of blood sprinkled Kawahara’s face. Pain flared brightly. For a moment, I could see the pliers through the eye they were embedded in, towering away like a massive steel pylon, and then Kawahara twisted the jaws and something burst. My vision splashed red and then winked out, a dying monitor screen like the ones at Elliott’s Data Linkage. From my other eye I saw Kawahara withdraw the pliers with Reese’s recording wire gripped in the jaws. The rear end of the tiny device dripped minute spots of gore onto my cheek.

She’d go after Elliott and Reese. Not to mention Ortega, Bautista and who knew how many others.