Yeah, Lady Clare thought tiredly, if you want a massacre. She looked at the old man and wondered if he knew how few soldiers would be willing to die if that was the order he issued. All government worked on the basis that the army was both loyal and stupid, but Lady Clare wasn’t sure they were that stupid.
Though the Old Guard would die to a man if ordered. Intensive psychometric testing was in place to guarantee that. And the really bizarre thing was that the man they’d die for was truly nondescript. If he hadn’t been a Bonaparte, no one would have glanced at him twice. As it was, his face was on every bank draft issued by the Banque Impériale de Paris.
And why should he be concerned? Even the Reich wouldn’t dare kill the Prince Imperial if he surrendered. He was an old man, revered, all but defeated: not that he’d been that threatening to start with, except as a figurehead. The Reich could afford to offer him safe passage to Zurich. And the Swiss would have him, Lady Clare had no doubt about that, not with the amount of gold his family had salted away in the vaults of Hong Kong Suisse. It was locked in unbreakable trusts, of course. Otherwise Lady Clare would have suggested moving it somewhere safer, like off-planet.
Outside it was still raining, water slicking the dark streets and undermining already corroded concrete, making the sidewalks even more unsafe. She could see the rain as it beat hard against the window, but she couldn’t hear it. Triple-glazed, micromesh-laminated polymer, it was designed to keep out more than the sound of a storm.
“My dear?” It was the Prince Imperial this time, his voice polite but insistent. The old man wasn’t going to let her sit this one out: she had to commit.
What she wanted to say was Surrender now, please. But she couldn’t get those words out, no matter how much half of her wanted to. So instead Lady Clare took a deep breath and did what she’d promised herself she wouldn’t do: tell the truth, or as much of it as she could manage. “At the moment surrender isn’t our best option. But, even so, fighting might not be wise.”
“Wise?” The elderly man seemed puzzled. “Why not?”
“Keep the army as your last resort,” suggested Lady Clare and shut her mouth, sitting back in her chair. With luck she could leave it at that.
Luck wasn’t with her.
“Because we should save them?”
“No.” Lady Clare said brusquely, meeting the Prince Imperial’s gaze. “Because they can’t be trusted.”
The crash of the field marshal’s chair tipping backwards was shock enough to still the whole Council Room but — on his feet or not — the field marshal still didn’t get a chance to speak. Count Lazlo was in there first, telling them all his version of what it was Lady Clare was trying to say.
“No alternative but eventual surrender then...” Fussy, snide, mocking — Lady Clare loathed his voice on instinct, but not as much, Lady Clare suspected, as Lazlo loathed everything about her. Lazlo smiled at Lady Clare, his green eyes watchful but cold. “At least, I think that’s what the Minister for Internal Affairs and National Security is trying to say...” He stressed the second part of her title, as if it were her personal fault that Paris was surrounded, its ferroconcrete buildings being eaten away from within.
“No,” Lady Clare said. “That isn’t what I mean at all...”
She saw surprise reach Lazlo’s eyes, noted too that the young Minister for Finance was suddenly watching her, but what Lady Clare really noticed was hope sparking in the eyes of the Prince Imperial, then just as suddenly dying.
“I won’t sacrifice this city.” His voice was calm, undramatic. But for once his habitual politeness was cut with steel.
“I’m not suggesting that,” Clare said shortly. “The battle computers are down. We have fewer than fifty functioning APVs, almost no working aircraft and hardly any cannon, the virus has seen to that. At best we have fifteen hundred officer-issue Colt ceramics. Hardly enough to fight a war. But then what about the Black Hundreds?” She turned to Lena. “Are their hovers still functioning? What is the state of their guns? And what of...”
“So you vote against surrender?” Lazlo interrupted.
“Wait until I’ve finished talking,” Lady Clare said sharply and then turned her attention to the field marshal who was sheepishly retaking his seat, trying not to catch her eye. They were all men but her. That was the way the Third Empire worked. She hadn’t liked it when she started out, and she didn’t like it now. What she liked even less was that she’d managed to change so little in her forty years of serving the Imperial Government.
She was back in control, at least in control of them if not of herself. They were waiting for her now. Her words would carry dangerous weight as they always had done: and until now she’d always liked that feeling. Liked the slight fear that flickered across people’s eyes when she appeared.
But this was payback and none of them even knew what she was going through. Paris or LizAlec was a choice Lady Clare couldn’t easily make. Not just because the child still thought Lady Clare was her mother, but because it was Lady Clare who gave LizAlec life. Lady Clare had overruled the refusal of the Sorbonne’s Ecole de Médecin to release Alex Gibson’s frozen sperm. That was sixteen years ago. Three weeks later, having ordered a Web-wide search for details of Razz’s clone-insurance policy, she’d had an entire Razz clone quietly lifted from the cryonic vaults of FirstVirtual.
It wasn’t the meat Lady Clare wanted, that vat-kept heap of barely living flesh, it was the clone’s ovaries. The director at Marne had mixed sperm and ova himself, implanting the resulting cytoplast into Lady Clare in her own bedroom at the Hotel Sabatini. Nine months later Elizabeth Alexandra was born — no surrogates, no synthetic wombs, no fast-forwarding the period of gestation.
The child Alex and Razz would never have, because one was psychotic and dead and the other was alive and a god, but still insane for all that. Both had been her lovers in their time: not for long, admittedly, and she’d never meant to either of them what they meant to each other. But all the same, she’d had their child. Alone, at night, in that vast bed.
LizAlec or Paris? How could she vote to surrender the capital of the Empire? How could she not vote...? Lady Clare put her head in her hands, pushing knuckles into dark-ringed eye sockets until fractal stars exploded behind her eyes. No tears, not here. Not in front of these people.
Let the Prince Imperial decide.
“I abstain,” Lady Clare said flatly. Ignoring Lena, Count Lazlo and the youthful but fat Minister of Finance, she met the Prince Imperial’s sad eyes. Saw the tired old man bow under the weight of another responsibility. Saw the hurt in his face and knew she could never tell him why.
Kidnappers killed their victims in seventy-three per cent of cases: Lady Clare had looked up the figures. The cold probability was that she couldn’t save LizAlec whichever way she voted, that there was a twenty-nine per cent likelihood that she was already dead, but that wasn’t the point. At least, Lady Clare told herself it wasn’t.
Chapter Eleven
Vacuum Sucks
Suction kept the steel plate attached to the wall. It was true that epoxy clips had been gunned to the polycrete blocks at all four corners, but even Lars could see these were powdery with age, shoddily positioned and barely able to cope with the minimal strain of Luna gravity. No, what kept the steel plate stuck to the wall was suction, pure and simple...
Which meant there was atmosphere on the other side of that plate. Not a weak quarter-atmosphere like in the tunnel he was in, but a full half or maybe more. Maybe even the full fucking monty. Hung in a tunnel, feet extended forward and back pressed hard against cold rock, Lars couldn’t name the relevant laws of physics, but he knew from experience the basic rules governing grades of vacuum. Staying alive depended on it. And if there was breathable air on the other side of that gap then he wanted to get through. Where there was good air there was usually power and what Lars needed more than anything right now was somewhere to plug in Ben’s ice bucket. He also needed to find food and recharge the cat
alyst for his lung, but they came lower down his list of essentials. And to be honest, he could go a lot longer than a couple of weeks with his metabolism turned down to low.
Lars wasn’t letting himself think about the girl, because thinking about her upped his breathing rate and that messed up his metabolism. She was there, though. Every time he touched his fingertips against the metal, he could feel her words, like a low and angry vibration. How that happened, Lars didn’t know and didn’t care.
He had a bigger problem. Lars was suction-side to the plate which meant he’d have to push against the pressure. Even if he could push the plate away from the wall, chances were the escaping atmosphere from the airlock on the other side would slam it straight back, and probably take his hand or fingers with it.
“Right,” said Lars, tugging on Ben’s monofilament line. “Let’s scam you that power...” The icebox came up sweet and easy from the shaft below. Nothing snagged or caught, and Lars didn’t have to clamber back down to help the icebox make the climb. Though the warning diode was still flashing, with a slow and sullen flicker.
“Real soon,” Lars promised. “Just as soon as we get through this...”
In front of him was a hole cut in the side of the tunnel and closed off with a metal plate. Between the black rock of the tunnel and the plate was a single block’s thickness of polycrete. Lars pushed hard against the metal, putting all of his weight behind the effort. Even so, he was shocked when the plate shifted slightly under his feet. It was one thing to promise Ben everything would be all right, quite another for the rusted plate to actually move.
“Shit, man... We’re going do it.” Lars pushed again, hard as he could, and felt the plate slide suddenly sideways.
Baby Blowout. Baby Black.
Whatever was on the other side of that hatch it wasn’t an airlock. Lars could feel a sudden blast of decompression as high atmosphere was sucked through the narrow gap to be swallowed by the partial vacuum of his own tunnel. He was crouched in front of the hatch, hot wind whistling past his head as Lars fought to use his foot to slide the hatch back into place, sealing the air loss.
He thought it was hot air he’d felt but Lars wasn’t too sure: sometimes his feelings and imagination got bad-wired. Mostly he was fine, but just occasionally he’d grab a burger from a stall and instead of it being hot or sweet with ketchup it would taste blue and tingly. Or he’d stop off at a bar out on the Edge to catch NiFlyz Cadillac Jukebox and instead of notes he’d get different tastes.
“Synaesthesia” wasn’t a word Lars knew. But he knew the side effects well enough. Sometimes it was useful, like when he could feel his way up a new rock tunnel by listening to the notes of its surface, watching for the dark tones that indicated danger. Other times it just fucked up his head.
When that happened he’d go surface at Planetside Arrivals and steal a strip of ParaDerm from the shop with the green neon cross in its window. Lars had a thing for ParaDerm. Two stopped his headache, four made him feel warm and eight kicked him into sleep without dreams. Eight was good.
“This time,” said Lars and pushed hard with his foot, dislodging the plate further, wind howling past him so hard it almost blew him down the tunnel like shit off a shovel. Flipping round, Lars jammed his fingers through the hatch and gripped the edge of the plate, trying to shift it. Grit hammered against the mask of his suit and, as Lars tried to ram his shoulders in through the newly opened gap, something soft slammed into the other side of the wall, smashing into his head and partly sealing the gap.
“Shi—” Scrabbling frantically, fingers clawing at laser-cut rock, half stunned, Lars only just kept his balance as colours exploded in front of his eyes, like opening flowers. It took Lars a fraction of a second to realize that the flowers were pain. And when he came to — another fraction of a second after that — he was crouched back in the access shaft, back pushed hard against cold rock, facing the blast of air. His face mask was powdery with ice crystals or dust.
Lars turned, the way a baby turns in the womb, but infinitely faster, with snake-like fluidity. Shuffling his shoulders and hips, bending his thick legs under him until his head was pushed into the narrow opening, Lars flexed his legs hard against the stone shaft behind him and shoved himself forwards, his hands digging into warm flesh.
Not scavenger fat but soft, rich with spare muscle. Fed. Lars couldn’t imagine what it was like to have someone just give you food. But this one, she probably couldn’t imagine what it was like to scavenge.
On the other side of the wall, LizAlec was screaming, Lars could feel it through his fingertips. Not that he blamed her. If someone had been trying to burrow their hands through his stomach while suction from a blow-out held him flat against a rough wall — hell, he’d have been screaming too.
Hands palm-on to the wall, Earth-strong muscles pushing her aching torso away from the wall, knees ripped raw and bloody, LizAlec fought to unglue her gut from the deadly suction. It wasn’t until she felt her body peel free from the hole that she even consciously became aware of Lars fighting past her as the boy slithered swiftly into her tiny cell, one shoulder casually dislocated to let him fit through the gap.
As Lars tumbled onto the ground, LizAlec’s cell went from minor decompression back up to a baby blowout, grit being sucked clean off the floor as precious atmosphere howled under the door like air dragged the wrong way down an organ pipe only to be swallowed through the ravenous hatch. It was time to put the cork back in the monkey.
“Help me,” Lars shouted desperately, struggling with the plate as the girl stood there letting heat and oxygen bleed away around her. “Fucking help me,” Lars shouted, grabbing her shoulder, then ducked as she swung wildly in his direction, wide-eyed with horror, breath streaming from her lungs in a long scream. The girl was blind in the dark, Lars realized with shock. She couldn’t see him. Couldn’t hear him either come to that.
“Here,” said Lars, ripping aside his bubble mask. He grabbed her wrist, dragging LizAlec’s fingers towards the floor. Lars had no doubts she was stronger than him: how could she be otherwise when she’d only recently left Earth gravity? He was smarter though, Lars decided. Otherwise she’d have already plugged the gap on her own.
LizAlec touched the steel plate, felt the strange hand grip her wrist and guessed what she was meant to do. Lifting the plate waist high, she stalled to position it clumsily over the open hatch. But Lars had other ideas, ones that didn’t involve LizAlec losing all her fingers.
Pulling the raised plate out of her hands, Lars threw it hard at the wall and saw the baby black half catch the hatch and hold it. He couldn’t have hacked lifting the plate by himself, his legs weren’t strong enough, but once it was up off the ground he could manage the rest.
A tiny gap still bled away atmosphere, but it was nothing to the swallowing emptiness of before. Pulling the girl over towards the wall, Lars tried to get her to help him slide the plate shut, but she jerked away from him and tripped, crashing to her knees.
“Jesus fuck.” Lars left her there — shuddering with cold and fear — and grabbed a folded square of paper from the ground, wrapped this round one shaking hand and pushed the steel square back into place himself.
Instant silence broken only by a siren somewhere in the background, its wail rising and falling like the howl of a distant ghost. In total, from when Lars and LizAlec simultaneously — but unknown to each other — began trying to removing the plate, to LizAlec finally sliding it back in place was maybe thirty-five seconds. Thirty-five seconds of oxygen and heat being bled away into a partial vacuum.
It wasn’t a Big Black, thirteen seconds of which killed you as surely as a bullet to the head, but it felt like one, at least it did to Lars. LizAlec didn’t seem to be feeling anything. She’d toppled sideways and was curled up in the dirt, choking, her mouth open like a dying fish as desperate gulps of air going down met vomit coming back up.
“Oh, fuck it.” Lars kicked her lightly in the diaphragm, which did the trick, bubbles
of vomit spewing out on to the floor and then air rasping back down her suddenly cleared throat. He used the few seconds it took the girl to get her breath back to take a good look at her.
It was the first time Lars had seen a naked woman, at least a real live one. All the others had been holoporn projections or spread wide with some flashing pay-by-access Web address strung behind their blonde wigs like a dayglo banner. She was less contoured than he’d have expected a woman to be. Smaller breasts, narrower hips, less of her all round. Her nipples were neat, though, puckered and pulled erect by the chill.
It didn’t occur to Lars that the pneumatic porn-babes he lusted after were not just computer-enhanced, they were mostly just not real. Most were vActors, digital flesh pasted over three-dimensional, fully functional raytraced frames. Some were masterpieces of coding, but most were cut-and-paste clones of earlier idoru, updated for changes in taste. Small tails were big again, so were fine all-over pelts and pixie-like ears that folded in on themselves until they looked like vulvas. Furry was massive right now.
This one was way different, and Lars liked the difference. Her skin was smooth and mostly hairless, its shade pink and yellow mixed in with brown, and there were glints of deep red fire in her dark curls. Not that her hair was cropped close like most people’s, instead it just tumbled below the back of her neck. Casual and chaotic.
Lars had no idea a cut like that cost more than Planetside was offering for his arrest, but then neither did LizAlec. She’d just palm-printed the make-over against her mother’s account at Gattopardo.
Stepping over the still-gasping LizAlec, Lars took a quick look at the girl from behind. Her thin body didn’t go in much at the waist and her spine could be seen all the way down her back. Her legs were thin and muscled and she had tight buttocks that made Lars swallow hard just from looking. From behind she looked like Ben.
“What name?” Lars asked LizAlec, touching her lightly on the shoulder. LizAlec jumped and scrambled to her feet, arms outstretched in the darkness to keep him away.
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