“It’s not going to be a week,” she said guiltily. “We need to be out of here before the Deliverance ships arrive, and that’s only going to be a couple of days at most. They’ve already flipped over and started deceleration.”
“Then let’s go. My clothes should be dry.”
“What?” She didn’t remember the shirt being damp.
“My clothes. I put them in the washing machine last night.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right. I made you a new shirt, but the printer crashed before it could finish your trousers. The solnet is thick with exponential darkware right now. It’s taking the G8Turings a long time to purge it all.”
Horatio kissed her. “You fabricated clothes for me?”
“You didn’t bring a bagez. So…”
“Thank you.”
She smiled sheepishly. “You’re welcome.”
A long moment of quiet joy, then, “We’d better get out and see what ingredients we can find,” he said.
“Sure. This is Chelsea. There are lots of food shops.”
“Yeah, but we don’t need deli food. We need—”
“Real food?” she said, raising a teasing eyebrow. “Fish and chips? Full English breakfast?”
“Only if you’re talking fried black pudding.”
“Right, then, let’s go see what kind of black pudding the delis of Chelsea stock.”
“Do they have a throwback novelty section?”
* * *
—
Crina was not happy.
“We should remain inside the penthouse, ma’am,” she said as soon as Gwendoline announced an expedition to buy printer ingredients. “I cannot guarantee your safety outside.”
“I’ll wear mesh-reinforced jacket and jeans, and you can carry whatever weapons you want. If there’s any sign of trouble we’ll come straight back.”
“My orders are that you should not leave the penthouse, ma’am.”
The last thing Gwendoline wanted now was to call the duty security officer at Connexion’s Greenwich tower and ask them to let her go outside. It would be humiliating—a family board member demoted to whiny nursery school child. She could see a sheen of sweat on Crina’s brow, so the bodyguard was clearly nervous about this power struggle.
“Look,” Horatio said in his smoothly reasonable tone. “We completely agree that remaining in the penthouse is the safest option, and that’s where we’re going to stay until the Security Division tells us to relocate. But we simply don’t have enough food to last the three of us more than a couple of days, and we have no idea how long this emergency is going to continue. Right now we have a safe window to go a few hundred meters along the road to gather essential supplies. The streets are practically deserted. Nobody is panicking, yet. In another day—or probably less—everyone else is going to start realizing they need food supplies as well. That’s when the breakdown will start, and I’ll be on your side about venturing beyond the security barrier. But getting in a decent stockpile now means we won’t have to go out foraging again after the city goes wild. You’ll have guaranteed our security for a much longer time. Surely that’s part of your brief, too?”
Crina struggled with the decision, her flat face frozen up tight. “No more than half an hour,” she said. “And if we encounter potential hostiles we terminate the venture immediately.”
“Of course,” Gwendoline said.
“I’ll collect some additional equipment, then we can go.” She walked down to the guest bedroom, stiff-legged and square-shouldered.
When the door shut, Gwendoline turned to Horatio. “Foraging?”
“Me hunter gatherer,” he grunted out and thumped his chest. “Provide for womanfolk.”
“Provide me some balsamic vinaigrette for my avocado salad, and I’m all yours.”
“Good to know. Does she seem all right to you?” He nodded at the closed door.
“She just takes her job seriously, that’s all. In that profession you have to.”
“No. I mean: all right? As in, she didn’t look well to me.”
“Look, she’s in a tough position, with no backup. Go easy on her.”
“Ha. Me? You might want to stop encouraging her to call you ma’am.”
“Say what?”
“Ma’am. It’s medieval. Titles that distinguish us by class devalue people as much as racial classification. Divide and conquer, the go-to strategy of the ruling elite since the dark ages.”
She licked her lips tauntingly. “Yes, comrade.”
“Thank you.”
“Just so you know, I’m not sure if she’ll be allowed to come with us to Nashua.”
“I thought that,” he replied in a low voice. “So if we get a whole stash of printer ingredients now, she’ll have food for herself after we leave.”
“Horatio, if we need to go to Nashua, it’s over for Earth. Another week of food won’t make any difference in the long term.”
“But we’ll have done the decent thing, the right thing. That matters. Even now. Maybe, especially now.”
Gwendoline put her arms around him and hugged tight. “I never did deserve you.”
* * *
—
The streets were unnervingly quiet when they walked out of the apartment block onto Milman’s Street. Its buildings were mostly from a late twenty-first-century rebuilding phase, a nostalgic recreation of a stone-built Georgian splendor that had existed only in wistful illustrations of nineteenth-century boulevards, possible only because money had slowly eased out the less well-off so the truly rich could expand their much needed floorspace into newly vacant real estate. Wealth and metrohubs had also brought a distinctive greening, so that at ground level it looked like the borough had been freshly carved out of a forest, with all the trees and creeper-covered walls maintained to a suitably high standard.
Gwendoline frowned up at the old beeches and London plane trees lining the clear path as her brain struggled to define the source of the wrongness.
“Wind,” she said suddenly. “There’s no wind.” The twigs and branches above her were perfectly still; leaves that normally fluttered in gentle discord hung immobile and silent.
“The shield cuts us off from weather,” Horatio said. “It’s going to be like living in a greenhouse.” He flicked his gaze at Crina, who was perspiring heavily.
“Is there going to be enough oxygen?” Gwendoline asked. “I mean, if we’re sealed in, there’ll be no fresh air.”
“It’ll last for months,” he said. “Years probably. We don’t have to think that far ahead. This’ll be settled one way or another long before we reach that point.”
They set off north, away from the Thames, heading for King’s Road, and the notorious shops that bestowed the road its status of exclusivity. Her two bagez followed them obediently. Two, because she felt optimism was what she wanted to bring to the day. As they walked, the sound level crept up. They passed stalled deliverez and urban cleanez under the trees; unable to recharge their batteries, the little machines had spent the night burning through their reserve power trying to find a live induction point. Two abandoned taxez blocked the clear path; cybernetic heads buried in the sand, they didn’t respond to altme pings. One had a buckled wheel where it had hit a bollard with considerable force. Gwendoline saw a few small spots of blood on the pavement around it. Her hand crept to her leather jacket’s zip, sliding it right up to the collar, completing the protective cover the integral mesh provided.
King’s Road had inert cabez littered underneath the arched gold-glass canopy that stretched from Sloane Square all the way down to New King’s Road. So many times she’d strolled along here, sheltered from the British climate, so she could browse the fashionista TryMe houses or meet up with friends in the bars and bistros. Good times contemplating the salons—which were essentially clinics in fancy dress, they blurre
d the line so skillfully between cosmetic treatment and outright medical recrafting procedures. Those times when she was the ultimate gilded bird in her gilded cage. Now it was all so different. Darkened, without power, abandoned by their snobbish staff, the stores were gloomy, their glamour and appeal vanished like a past season’s style. Even the cheery flowering vines that wrapped the canopy pillars had lost their verve under the cursed bruise sky.
She was as surprised as she was pleased that some of the independent stores were open. Not her haunts—the boutiques and frippery merchants—but the smaller shops supplying essentials. Even a couple of family-run cafés were setting out their pavement tables. Such entrepreneurship was drawing people out of their homes. They might have been wearing smart, expensive clothes that signaled their SW10 postcode, but Gwendoline recognized the slightly strained expressions, the polite determination. Like her, they’d have access to a higher strata of news and sources, and had come to realize they needed to start preparing if they were going to survive this—even if this was just the few days until the Deliverance ships arrived. If the city shield held after that, the future was all down to fate.
And Grandpa, she acknowledged bleakly. That wasn’t reassuring at all. But Ainsley III would do what he could.
Horatio was staring around, his pursed-lips expression a perfect sculpture of scholarly thought. She told Theano to snag the image. She smiled to herself.
“We should go in there,” he said.
Gwendoline looked where he was pointing and frowned. “A café?”
“Yes. Think about it. They’ll have a storeroom out the back with wholesale sacks of food printer ingredients.”
“Oh. Right.” She was cross with herself for not working that out first.
Bianchi’s Café was a family business, boasting speciality organic coffee and fresh-baked pastries. An Italian man in his late fifties with a cheery smile stood behind the counter and greeted them effusively. The shelves on the wall behind him had tins of fifty types of coffee beans.
Horatio went up and ordered Guatemalan Atitlán coffee and slices of chocolate and almond torta caprese for all of them. Gwendoline admired the way he fought back a loud how much? at the price as she proffered her cryptoken. Crina insisted that they sit outside. “That will give us visibility and unrestricted withdrawal options, ma’am.”
Gwendoline nodded, trying not to wince. Now that Horatio had preached about it, ma’am stood out every time the bodyguard used it. Because it’s true.
A worried-looking teenage waitress brought the coffees and cake, then hurried back indoors. Horatio was still up at the counter, talking to the owner. Both of them laughed.
Charmer, Gwendoline sighed. She liked to think she could talk to anyone, but knew in her heart that if she’d tried to negotiate this, the man would have shut down. I can schmooze a billion-wattdollar loan from a banker, but not a packet of meat powder from a café owner. How screwed up is that?
A handshake, and Horatio was sauntering over to the table.
“We got it,” he said proudly. “Enough basic protocrab pellets to fill the bagez. I hope your cryptoken is full of watts.”
“It is.”
“Good,” Crina said. “If you’ve secured supplies, we should leave.”
“Whoa, there.” Horatio held up a finger. Smiling pleasantly, he sipped his coffee and made a show of appreciation to the owner. “That would be insulting to Papa Bianchi. First we enjoy his excellent coffee at a reasonable speed, then reluctantly leave and complete the deal.”
Crina’s lips tightened. “Very well.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
Gwendoline studied the bodyguard. She was still sweating, and her skin had turned a pallid shade. Horatio was right; something was off. It couldn’t be anxiety, not Crina. A fever?
It was sitting next to the preternaturally alert Crina that clued Gwendoline in to the new arrivals long before they got close, a tide incoming from the west. Kids were rolling along King’s Road on boardez. Grouped together in threes and fours, they glided onward in tight formations, taking over the whole width of the clear path. Other people got out of their way—those not so young, not so cheaply dressed, lacking hair that was rainbow serpentdreds coiling out from statement hats. It wasn’t even the foreign styles that made Gwendoline twitchy. Attitude was their dominant feature.
Horatio watched the gradual takeover for a minute and drained his coffee.
“Time to go, ma’am,” Crina said firmly.
Horatio didn’t even protest the ma’am.
They loaded up the bagez while an uneasy Papa Bianchi cleared the tables outside. Not far away, a gathering of the intruders started rattling the security rods protecting a charcuterie’s windows. The distinctive high-pitched grinding sound of an activeblade was audible.
“This way,” Crina said. She started walking east, away from Milman’s Street.
“But—”
“We’re not heading toward them, ma’am. That invites confrontation. We’ll go down Beaufort Street then cut back along the embankment. Beaufort Street is wider, too, and mainstream; that’s in our favor.”
“Okay.”
They were walking faster along King’s Road now. Not obviously hurrying, not scared, just people with somewhere to go. They weren’t the only ones; SW10 residents were astutely draining away.
“Hey, yol scoot much, b’there?”
Four kids on boardez came sliding neatly around the sprawling buttress trunk of a silk cotton tree, moving quicker than walking pace. Gwendoline was obscurely annoyed that their boardez still had plenty of power. How come their borough has electricity?
The leader, or at least the one who’d spoken, leaned in toward them. Hands clasped behind his back, top hat angled over. A graceful mover, his boardez adapting efficiently to the weight shift, bringing him in close. He was grinning hungrily, showing off bloodred teeth.
“What, yo no’call?” It was a taunt, the superiority of a hunter to its prey.
Crina barely looked in his direction. She raised her arm. The suit sleeve swelled, hanging down like a flaccid wattle. Gwendoline heard a soft puk sound.
The smartsplat hit the leader of the boardez crew with perfect accuracy in the center of his chest. A slender bullet in the air, it blossomed out to a twenty-centimeter disk a fraction of a second before impact. The kinetic energy was similar to being punched by a heavyweight boxer—enough to fell a full-grown adult male—and that was before the taze charge kicked in. The impact flung him backward, arms windmilling, screeching more in shock than pain. His arse hit the ground at the same time as the electric pulse slammed into his skin, and he became the ball in a game of human skittles, tumbling into his mates. All of them went down in flailing limbs and outraged cries.
“You!” Crina snapped at the kids. “Fuck off or die!”
Gwendoline gasped. She wouldn’t? Would she?
“Don’t stop, don’t run,” the bodyguard ordered a shock-frozen Gwendoline and Horatio.
Gwendoline just did as she was told. Desperate to look back. Commanding herself not to.
Crina ducked around a Queensland pine whose topmost branches were shoving up against the road’s gold canopy. Then they all took a sharp turn into Beaufort Street. This road had never been remodeled, there was no need; it was the kind other roads aspired to be. Neat brick-and-stone buildings of classy London apartments, with a greenway of oaks and yellow poplars down the middle where grass had replaced the tarmac. Its prestige was confirmed by being awarded two metrohubs, one at each end.
Thankfully, there weren’t many people ahead. Those Gwendoline did see were all heading in the same direction, away from King’s Road.
“Where did all these kids come from?” she asked.
“Those serpentdreds are popular with the Fellnike Troop, who operate out of Earl’s Co
urt,” Horatio said. “So it’s most likely them, or a splinter.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Gwendoline asked.
“Earl’s Court is where a lot of the ribbontown kids wind up when they come to the big city. It’s not the greatest environment. Some agencies I advise do work there.”
“Oh. Right.” She risked a glance over her shoulder. Thankfully, she couldn’t see any of the Fellnike Troop, if that’s who they were, coming after them down Beaufort Street. But the trees made a direct view impossible, and if they were using the trunks for cover it would be difficult to see them.
Six bee-sized drones detached themselves from underneath Crina’s suit collar and starting flying in both directions along the road. Gwendoline was rather pleased with herself for analyzing their tactical position.
They were another hundred meters toward the Thames when Crina announced: “Casualty ahead.”
“Where?” Horatio peered forward.
Gwendoline couldn’t see anything but buildings and trees, with few people remaining ahead of them. “Did the Troop kids get ahead of us?”
“No, ma’am. It’s a lone male. Still breathing but looks in distress. No visible physical injures; the drone can’t detect any blood. He’s on the left. I don’t think it’s an ambush.” She started scanning the thick boughs arching above. “We can avoid him easily.”
“We could,” Horatio said, “but we’re not going to.”
Crina gave Gwendoline an urgent look. “Ma’am, there are active hostiles in the area. We really can’t take the chance.”
“Her name is Gwendoline, and I will go and check him out,” Horatio said. “That way you two can stay safe.”
“We’ll all help if we can,” Gwendoline said primly, giving Horatio a sharp look. Now who’s being patronizing? But she, too, felt concern at Crina’s appearance. The bodyguard was still sweating, despite being in the dapple of the trees. There was something not quite right about the way she was walking, either, as if she were wading through some viscous liquid, forcing each leg forward.
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