Altered Carbon Read online

  'Outstanding. This seamless marriage of hardcore cyber­punk and hard-boiled detective tale is an astonishing first novel.'

  The Times

  'Hits the floor running and then starts to accelerate. For a first novel it is an astonishing piece of work. Intriguing and inventive in equal proportions and refuses to let go until the last page. A wonderful SF idea.'

  Peter F. Hamilton

  'Carbon-black noir with drive and wit, a tight plot and a back-story that leaves the reader wanting a sequel like another fix.'

  Ken Macleod

  'Brilliant. Unputdownable. Lots of similar blurb-writing cliches, only in this case all true. I loved it. It is expertly plotted, grips you throughout, a high-tech ride in which the shocks and excitement are placed with machine-tooled polish. It is also superbly written, passages of cool, detached writing that is wonderfully atmospheric, alternating with passages of ultraviolence brutal enough to be genuinely shocking.'

  Adam Roberts

  'Morgan's first novel is a brilliant start to what promises to be an outstanding career. ALTERED CARBON captures the best of SF and spins it in a new direction that will not only have existing genre fans crying out for more, but will in all likelihood attract the biggest new readership since William Gibson made SF cool again. This is without doubt my hottest recommendation for 2002.'

  Michael Rowley, Waterstones Enigma magazine

  'An exhilarating and glossy adventure punctuated by bursts of extreme violence. The plot reaches terminal velocity early on and stays there. What makes ALTERED CAR­BON a winner is the quality of Morgan's prose. For every piece of John Woo action there is a stunning piece of reflective description, a compelling sense of place and abundant 24-carat witticisms. A commanding novel.'

  SFX magazine

  'A crisp, tight SF mystery. Its plotting is nothing short of first rate. The level of sheer pulp violence is almost exhilarating. ALTERED CARBON may be high-octane pulp, but it's pulp that does exactly what it sets out to do.'

  Locus

  'I was completely blown away by ALTERED CARBON. From the very first page, it's a pure adrenalin rush of slick, hard-hitting prose, superb characterisation and a plot that grabs you and just won't let go. A superbly rich and varied feast of fiction. Richard Morgan is destined to be a very, very big name in science fiction circles for a long time to come. Welcome to the Next Big Thing.'

  The Alien Online

  'A superb SF noir-thriller .. . truly remarkable. Brash and violent, highly intelligent and highly entertaining. Morgan bounds on to the stage with his debut performance and

  totally astounds the audience.'

  SF Revu

  'A first novel so exciting, so addictive and so bone-crunchingly in your face that it beggars the need for such virtual reality as it occasionally employs. This is a ceaseless, permanently off-balance sprint through an all-too-grimly-familiar future where miraculous technologies are

  degraded through everyday use and abuse. There are occasional throwaway mentions of background details here that beg entire novels on their own; ubiquitous pieces of history dismissed in single lines that had my nose twitching, scenting something far bigger lurking, hidden under the surface.'

  Infinity Plus

  'Dazzling. An excellent, no-holds-barred, fast paced thril­ler with a strong central character and plenty of betrayals, twists, shocks and action.'

  Dreamwatch Magazine

  'A tautly plotted slice of noir . . . the sense of wonder is in the details. Morgan gives notice that there's a new star in the SF firmament.' The Third Alternative

  'A homage to old-school cyberpunk . . . ALTERED CARBON reads like a hypermodern vampire novel.'

  The Guardian

  'High-tension SF action, hard to put down, though squeamish readers may shut their eyes rather frequently.'

  David Langford, amazon.co.uk

  'Combining thought-provoking ideas with page-turning, intense narrative is no mean feat, but ALTERED CARBON delivers. Richard Morgan looks set to become one of sf-noir's best, diamond-bright practitioners.'

  Interzone

  ALTERED

  CARBON

  RICHARD MORGAN

  Copyright © Richard Morgan 2002

  All rights reserved

  The right of Richard Morgan to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2002

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 575 07390 X

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There is a vast distance between deciding to write a first novel and actually seeing it published, and the journey across this distance can be emotionally brutal. It comes with loneliness attached, but at the same time requires a massive faith in what you're doing that is hard to sustain alone. I was only able to complete this journey thanks to a number of people along the way, who lent me their faith when my own was running very low. Since the technology imagined in Altered Carbon doesn't exist yet, I'd better get on and thank these travelling companions while I can, because without their support, I'm pretty certain Altered Carbon itself would not exist either.

  In order of appearance, then:

  Thanks to Margaret and John Morgan for putting to­gether the original organic material, to Caroline (Dit-Dah) Morgan for enthusiasm from before she could speak, to Gavin Burgess for friendship when often neither of us were in any condition to speak, to Alan Young for depths of unconditional commitment there isn't any way to speak, and to Virginia Cottinelli for giving me her twenties when I'd almost used mine up. Then, the light at the end of a very long tunnel, thanks to my agent Carolyn Whitaker for considering drafts of Altered Carbon not once, but twice, and to Simon Spanton at Gollancz for being the man to finally make it happen.

  May the road always rise to meet you,

  May the wind be always at your back

  This book is for

  my father and mother:

  JOHN

  for his iron endurance and

  unflagging generosity of spirit

  in the face of adversity

  &

  MARGARET

  for the -white hot rage

  that dwells in compassion and

  a refusal to turn away

  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 butt 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 bi
g 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 weighed 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 arid 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. A 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 granted and attempted to rise, but the grunt turned into a cough and I tasted blood on my tongue.

  'Don't you 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.

  PART 1 : ARRIVAL

  (NEEDLECAST DOWNLOAD)

  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.