For the most part, anyway.
Occasionally, though, I wonder what Tanya Wardani might be doing by now. I wonder if she is already out on the edges of the Sanction system somewhere, turning the face of some new sleeve tired and intent as she pores over the glyph locks on a Martian dreadnought. I wonder how many other deadwired hulks there are spinning around out there, whirling up to trade fire with their ancient enemies and then falling away injured into the night again, machines creeping out to soothe and repair and make ready for the next time. I wonder what else we’re going to come across in those unexpectedly crowded skies, once we start looking. And then, occasionally, I wonder what they were all doing there in the first place. I wonder what they were fighting for in the space around that nondescript little star and I wonder if in the end they thought it was worth it.
Even more occasionally, I turn my mind to what I have to do when we do get to Latimer, but the detail seems unreal. The Quellists will want a report. They’ll want to know why I couldn’t twist Kemp closer to their designs for the whole Latimer sector, why I changed sides at the critical moment, and worst of all, why I left things no better aligned than they were when they needlecast me in. It’s probably not what they had in mind when they hired me.
I’ll make something up.
I don’t have a sleeve right now, but that’s a minor inconvenience. I’ve got a half-share in twenty million UN dollars banked in Latimer City, a small gang of hardened spec ops friends, one of whom boasts blood connection to one of the more illustrious military families on Latimer. A psychosurgeon to find for Sutjiadi. A bad-tempered determination to visit the Limon Highlands and give Yvette Cruickshank’s family the news of her death. Beyond that, a vague idea that I might go back to the silver-grassed ruins of Innenin and listen intently for some echo of what I found on the Tanya Wardani.
These are my priorities when I get back from the dead. Anyone who has a problem with them can line right up.
In some ways, I’m looking forward to the end of the month.
This afterlife shit is overrated.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once again, thanks to my family and friends for putting up with me during the making of Broken Angels. It can’t have been easy. Thanks once again also to my agent Carolyn Whitaker for her patience, and to Simon Spanton and his crew, notably the very passionate Nicola Sinclair, for making Altered Carbon fly like a golden eagle on sulphate.
This is a work of science fiction, but many of the books that influenced it are not. In particular, I’d like to express my deepest respect for two writers from my non-fiction inspiration bank; my thanks go to Robin Morgan for The Demon Lover, which is probably the most coherent, complete and constructive critique of political violence I have ever read, and to John Pilger for Heroes, Distant Voices and Hidden Agendas, which together provide an untiring and brutally honest indictment of the inhumanities perpetrated around the globe by those who claim to be our leaders. These writers did not invent their subject matter as I did, because they did not need to. They have seen and experienced it for themselves at first hand, and we should be listening to them.
WOKEN FURIES
This book is for my wife
Virginia Cottinelli
who knows of impediment
Fury (n):
Ia intense, disordered and often destructive rage…
2 wild, disordered force or activity
3a any of the three avenging deities who in Greek mythology punished crimes
3b an angry or vengeful woman
PROLOGUE
The place they woke me in would have been carefully prepared. The same for the reception chamber where they laid out the deal. The Harlan family don’t do anything by halves and, as anyone who’s been Received can tell you, they like to make a good impression. Gold-flecked black decor to match the family crests on the walls, ambient subsonics to engender a tear-jerking sense that you’re in the presence of nobility. Some Martian artefact in a corner, quietly implying the transition of global custody from our long-vanished unhuman benefactors to the firmly modern hand of the First Families oligarchy. The inevitable holosculpture of old Konrad Harlan himself in triumphal ‘planetary discoverer’ mode. One hand raised high, the other shading his face against the glare of an alien sun. Stuff like that.
So here comes Takeshi Kovacs, surfacing from a sunken bath full of tank gel, sleeved into who knows what new flesh, spluttering into the soft pastel light and helped upright by demure court attendants in cutaway swimming costumes. Towels of immense fluffiness to clean off the worst of the gel and a robe of similar material for the short walk to the next room. A shower, a mirror – better get used to that face, soldier – a new set of clothes to go with the new sleeve, and then on to the audience chamber for an interview with a member of the Family. A woman, of course. There was no way they’d use a man, knowing what they did about my background. Abandoned by an alcoholic father at age ten, raised alongside two younger sisters, a lifetime of sporadically psychotic reaction when presented with patriarchal authority figures. No, it was a woman. Some urbane executive aunt, a secret-service caretaker for the Harlan family’s less public affairs. An understated beauty in a custom-grown clone sleeve, probably in its early forties, standard reckoning.
‘Welcome back to Harlan’s World, Kovacs-san. Are you comfortable? ’
‘Yeah. You?’
Smug insolence. Envoy training conditions you to absorb and process environmental detail at speeds normal humans can only dream about. Looking around, the Envoy Takeshi Kovacs knows in split seconds, has known since the sunken bath awakening, that he’s in demand.
‘I? You may call me Aiura.’ The language is Amanglic, not Japanese, but the beautifully constructed misunderstanding of the question, the elegant evasion of offence without resorting to outrage, traces a clean line back to the First Families’ cultural roots. The woman gestures, equally elegantly. ‘Though who I am isn’t very important in this matter. I think it’s clear to you who I represent.’
‘Yes, it’s clear.’ Perhaps it’s subsonics, perhaps just the woman’s sober response to my levity that dampens the arrogance in my tone. Envoys soak up what’s around them, and to some extent that’s a contaminative process. You often find yourself taking to observed behaviour instinctively, especially if your Envoy intuition grasps that behaviour as advantageous in the current surroundings. ‘So I’m on secondment.’
Aiura coughs, delicately.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘Solo deployment?’ Not unusual in itself, but not much fun either. Being part of an Envoy team gives you a sense of confidence you can’t get from working with ordinary human beings.