She saw sudden worry fire up in his silver eyes and it was her turn to smile. Where to start depended on what it was you wanted from the victim. Abject terror was easy: from the relative subtlety of the underside of the tongue to the obviousness of exposed testicles, it took a matter of seconds only. There were other places... just inside the anus was always effective for humiliation. Eyeballs were good for instant panic. But that wasn’t what she wanted.
“Gloves,” she told the major, who made to pass the woman her own discarded pair until he saw her frown. Hastily he reached for the sergeant’s heavy pair of mitts and thrust his thin fingers into them, stretching the rubber.
“This isn’t necessary,” said Fixx, eyes fixed to her hand. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it...”
The unique selling point about the new Korean tasers was that they were pressure-sensitive. The more Lady Clare pressed down on the button, the brighter the spark... “Do what?” Lady Clare demanded. The taser felt light in her hand, pleasingly clinical in its white ceramic finish. She thumbed the button and watched jagged lightning dance from one electrode to the other.
“Do what?”
“Whatever you want,” Fixx said quickly. “You’re S3. First you hurt people, then you sympathize, then they do what you want. A kid I know told me...”
“Hold him.” Lady Clare demanded and the major grabbed Fixx by the shoulders.
“Face down...” Lady Clare ordered and waited while the major pushed the suddenly struggling Fixx flat on the bed.
Lower spine?
Neck?
Lady Clare ran the taser lightly down his spine, from neck to buttocks, increasing thumb pressure as she went. By the time she reached his lower spine, a gurgling Fixx was bucking under the hiss of sparks, muscles locked rigid with pain across his back. Flecks of froth dotted his lips.
This was the man... Lady Clare looked down, seeing the naked buttocks, the broad shoulders, the bloody stumps of his legs, though those wouldn’t have been there. This was the man who...
Oh fuck it. She tossed the taser onto the bed beside Fixx and nodded to the major. On cue, the man stood back, his piano-players having left bruised circles across Fixx’s shoulders
“You can go,” Lady Clare told the major and waited for him to tell her it was against regulations. But all the man did was toss rubber gloves onto the bed, nod for the fat sergeant to leave first and click the door quietly behind him. If he had any sense he’d go straight up the concrete stairs and out onto the rain-slicked cobbles of the Île de la Cité, and then keep going, right to the outskirts where he could buy a new identity and lose himself in the teeming mass that passed for humanity. Then all he had to do was stand and Sieg heil the Black Hundreds as they came marching in.
But he wouldn’t. Loyalty might be bred into the bone, but the procurété didn’t choose its bulls for intelligence or intuition. The major would go and read something obscure by Barthes at his club, while the sergeant would camp out upstairs in the NCOs’ Mess and drink bad Megrib coffee laced with cheap Normandy marc while nicking though frames of holoporn. Always assuming the system wasn’t down again.
Lady Clare might not know their names, but she knew how her men thought, even the insignificant ones. When she’d finished, the sergeant would stagger back down and expect to scrape Fixx off the tiled floor with a shovel, because shit shovelling was what the police did these days.
But instead of reaching for the taser to start it all over again, Lady Clare pulled a military hypodermic from her pocket and blasted 50ml of endorphin through the skin of Fixx’s neck. Switching the cartridge, she followed the endorphin with 100ml of seratonin and then 200mg of coproximol.
Pain slid away and Fixx suddenly felt both calm and slightly elated, which even he realized was pretty weird, given the discarded taser on the bed and the streaks of vomit drying on his chin. All the same, he didn’t let logic get in the way of his relief.
Indecent acts... It was odd, thought Lady Clare while looking at Fixx, it was odd the way sometimes the weapon you really needed was the one closest at hand. There were two cases against Fixx that involved indecent acts and only one of them concerned LizAlec. The other one, the earlier one, the really obscene one, involved illegal activity with a computer on the Moon.
“My daughter,” Lady Clare said but got no further.
Fixx nodded. The bitch was who he thought she was. Just a bit further up the greasy pole than LizAlec had led him to believe. “LizAlec,” he said, “what about her?”
“Kidnapped,” said Lady Clare, obscurely proud that not a single tremor betrayed the blackness inside her. She might feel old as sin but she wasn’t going to demean herself in front of Fixx, at least not more than she already had.
“Where?”
“The Arrivals Hall at Planetside...”
“You sent her?” Taser or not, Fixx didn’t bother to keep the contempt out of his voice. “How could you be that fucking stupid?” Shaking his head, Fixx caught sight of the abandoned Ted Brewer violin, and he nodded towards it with his chin. “And now that’s meant to make me want to go after her?”
She could tell him she’d sent LizAlec back to St Lucius for her own safety, because she’d know the Reich would move on Paris as soon as the virus struck, but Lady Clare didn’t bother, she didn’t believe it herself. Instead Lady Clare wondered if Fixx knew he was seconds away from writing his own suicide note and decided he just didn’t care. Either the man was tired of life or she’d pumped in too much coproximol.
“That’s what you want, right? You want my help?”
Lady Clare nodded.
Fixx thought about it. In one way she’d come to the right person, and not just because he had a bit of a thing going with LizAlec. Fixx knew all about Planetside. It was where he’d got thrown out of five years before, after he got emotionally too close to a full-Turing AI. Hell, he still owned an apartment there. In Chrysler. Seven vast rooms of art deco steel grown from a cross between Corbusier Lite and Mannerheim. He just couldn’t afford to live in them, even if he’d been allowed.
“Have the kidnappers made contact?” Fixx asked her at last.
“No.” Lady Clare lied without thinking about it. Fixx knew nothing of foreign policy and, for all she knew, probably cared even less. Her world wasn’t his, thank God. Besides, the situation was difficult enough without letting two separate parts of her life collide.
“But you’re worried?”
Lady Clare thought about nodding, then rejected the idea — too many tears were backed up in her eyes for them not to spill down her cheeks if she did.
“For what it’s worth, it wasn’t me.” Fixx said, but she knew that already
Lady Clare had a question to ask him. No, she had dozens, each darker than the one before. Starting with, Why my daughter? What had he got out of corrupting some defenceless kid? She wasn’t beautiful or even that rich, just intelligent and too strong-willed for her own good. Why? Why? Why? But instead, Lady Clare decided to ask just one question, the question that mattered. The only problem was that Lady Clare didn’t know which one it was, never mind how to ask it.
She didn’t need to.
“I loved her,” Fixx said baldly and dared her to deny it, to disagree. For a second, sitting there on the stumps of his legs, the steam-driven Samurai, the man who was once Sony’s most famous reMixer, looked almost sad. “Not at first,” he said “I didn’t really know her at first. She was just someone who hung about Schrödinger’s Kaff. You know, one of the street kids...”
Clare didn’t know. She didn’t know at all.
“Lady Elizabeth a street kid?”
Lady Clare was so busy being shocked she nearly missed the disbelief that flicked across Fixx’s battered face.
LizAlec? Lady Elizabeth...?
James Begley, mostly known as Fixx Valmont, stared at Lady Clare Fabio, who stared straight back. He really hadn’t known who LizAlec was, Lady Clare realized. Which meant LizAlec hadn’t told him. And that said more about Liz
Alec than it could ever say about Fixx.
Lady Clare sighed. “You used to meet her at Schrödinger’s Kaff?” Stupid question, hadn’t he just said he did...
Fixx nodded, thinking of their two-up battles against the Dragon and the incongruous glass tent he’d coded her for Fistful, patching it onto scrub in the Sierra Madre. Her home, LizAlec had called it, the one she didn’t have. Broken home, single-parent syndrome, a mother who was always out at work, he could remember almost everything she told him: if that wasn’t love, what was?
“St Lucius,” he said at last. “She’s not there on a scholarship, right?”
Lady Clare thought about the obscenely high fees and tried not to feel hurt. “No,” she said, “she’s not.”
Fixx was going to tell Lady Clare how LizAlec had followed him from Schrödinger’s Kaff to the Crash&Burn one night, hung at a nearby table until he’d had to take notice, but now didn’t seem the right moment.
“Right,” said Fixx. “So where do I come into this?”
“I want LizAlec back. And you get to take this with you, if you still want it.” She held up his Ted Brewer violin.
Of course he did: it was his, for a start. Of course, if the electricity supply died for good then the violin was useless, but Fixx didn’t reckon that would happen, not gone forever.
“Any idea where she is?” Fixx kept his voice so neutral he might have been discussing the weather, except no one was neutral where that was concerned, not with storms ripping apart buildings from Salzburg to the Atlantic coast.
“Darkside, maybe,” said Lady Clare. “Or one of the burbs. If it was LunaWorld or Planetside, I’d have noticed.”
Fixx didn’t actually ask his question but the woman answered it anyway. “Reciprocal security treaty. Besides, she was tagged,” said Lady Clare, her voice defensive.
“But the trace was removed,” Fixx finished for her, running what data he had through his mind and adding in what his old minder Albrecht would have done. “Probably got a cortex bomb too by now, if they bothered to keep her alive.”
Lady Clare looked at him and then shook her head. “LizAlec is alive.”
“Yeah?” Fixx had no doubt she meant it, he just wasn’t so sure she was right. Either that, or there was a lot she wasn’t telling him. “How do you know?”
“I just do,” said Lady Clare. “Put it down to a mother’s intuition.”
If she could call herself a mother, which was doubtful. But then Fixx still called himself a musician and five years had gone walkabout since he’d fixxed anything worth releasing, and even that had just been a tarted-up remix of KrystalKrash, featuring clips by Coppola and classic samples from Roni Size and Wagner.
Even so, the man was on the other edge of genius. An IQ of over 160 matched to the EQ of an amoral infant, Lady Clare knew that, or she did now. According to Fixx, what drove humanity wasn’t the usual troika of lust, greed and fear, it was vacuum. Whether people knew it or not, everything they did was about hiding from the void.
It wasn’t hipness that made artists gut the past for designer role models: fashion was really just another need to feed. All anyone had left to ransack for inspiration was history, and there was still plenty of that to go round.
Fixx didn’t deny that it was cheap, cut-price nihilism or that outside half a dozen minor academics he was probably one of the few people alive who could tell you who Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus had been. Certainly the only person who might care.
All the same, Lady Clare wasn’t sure what to make of a man who’d had one leg blown off in an organitskaya car bomb explosion and then promptly had the other one surgically removed to ensure symmetry...
Chapter Thirteen
CasaNegro
The bar sucked her in through its wide adobe door, the way CasaNegro always vacuumed up those with no place to go. Inside Jude’s place, the music was stripHop/cheezy-listening, stuff LizAlec hadn’t heard in years. Original edits, too, but the tunes went with the heat, the slight edge of sweat and the mix of unshaven locals and bare-armed, stained-top backpackers.
Over the bar itself was a neon sign advertising Electric Soup. It flashed two pictures, one of a bikini-clad cowgirl, the other of the same girl with her clothes off. LizAlec wasn’t to know, but as an original and still-functioning bit of Dallas kitsch it was one of Fracture’s best-known sights. LizAlec wasn’t sure what the girl advertised but she ordered a couple anyway, stuffing ice-cold tubes into the side pocket of Laughing Boy’s oversized jumpsuit. The problems only started when LizAlec offered the woman behind the bar her gold HKS card in payment.
It would be a lie to say everyone froze, LizAlec decided. But shoulders definitely stiffened all the way along the scuffed and cracked oak plank that made do as a bartop. Chinoed men who’d clocked her entrance began to watch more openly and one or two were actually grinning. Still, not an enhanced canine in sight, LizAlec realized with relief. Not a vampire, not a wolfBoy or sandrat. Just straight human, even if most of them did look like spares from Fistful, that opening bit where you got offed by a rug-wearing psycho if you insulted his mule.
As for the blonde woman behind the bar, she looked tougher than most of the men. She was certainly taller. “¿Tú tienes alguna cósa persona que puedes usar?”
LizAlec looked blank.
“Nihon?”
The girl shook her head. St Lucius didn’t teach Japanese, they taught Latin instead. She’d always thought it was a bloody stupid decision.
“Inglés?”
“Yes,” said LizAlec, smiling with relief. She could do English.
“Honey, you got anything anyone can actually use?” The woman was thirty going on three hundred and then some. Her blue eyes were washed out with enough background to plot-line a thousand newsfeed novelas.
“You don’t take cards?” LizAlec looked startled. The holos promised HKS was universal, one of the ads even had a grizzled miner on Io or somewhere happily swiping an HKS gold through his belt in return for an improbably large opal. “What do you use?”
“What you got?” A young boy in combats and a goth T-shirt crowded in at her shoulder. He looked about fourteen and had the most stupid haircut she’d ever seen. Fuck it, thought LizAlec. She needed some smart-arse kid like she needed killer PMS. Actually she needed gut-rot more than she needed the kid.
“Yáyase,” snapped the woman and the boy stepped back. But he didn’t go away, and it didn’t look like he intended to.
LizAlec glanced over to a table near the door hoping for back-up, only to find Lars wasn’t there. Typical. Maybe she should have left the freak out at the base. But she couldn’t. Not after what she’d seen in his head. All those empty tunnels, all that blood. No wonder he was...
Actually, LizAlec didn’t know what he was, she was still trying to work it out. As for exactly what Lars lacked, she’d given up on that one after she’d ticked off two lungs, a normal human set of teeth and a spiralling list of other things starting with a basic knowledge of what it was to be normal.
At least, what LizAlec considered normal.
And anyway, leaving him wasn’t an option. He had Lazlo’s black ring, the one that kept her face from exploding. She couldn’t wear the bloody thing herself, could she? Not without closing the circuit. Which meant keeping Lars close by her for company.
That hadn’t been too difficult to date, because he’d been safely punch-drunk when she’d bundled him into the back of the buggy and still groggy when she’d dragged him after her into the bar. Maybe that was the problem, LizAlec decided. Dragging a staggering freak behind her was bound to draw attention.
“I’ll take the bracelet,” the woman said, nodding to the silver band wound tight round LizAlec’s wrist. “And I’ll even give you some change.” Without waiting for LizAlec’s reply, the woman hit a key and pulled a couple of dead presidents from an old bell, lever and clockwork till. Rococo scrolls of gold fluttered up the side and “Industrial Business Machines” was written in script over every flat su
rface. It looked original.
LizAlec shook her head. “The bracelet won’t come off, I’ve tried.” And that was true. LizAlec wasn’t sure exactly when the bracelet had woken up, but in the last hour it had wound itself so tight onto her arm that her flesh had puffed up around it.
“No problems.” The kid in the combats dipped his hand into a knee pocket and came up with a vicious-looking pair of pliers. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”
The woman frowned, the shake of her head so slight that at first the boy didn’t notice it — until he saw her stare over his shoulder and turned to find Lars standing behind him, a clutter of talismans round his thick neck, arms slung loosely at his side, mouth half open. The sandrat’s balloon suit was open to the navel, the flesh below it maggot-white and hairless.
“How you do that?” He was talking to LizAlec, the boy and the woman so far out of his interest they might as well not have existed. “How?”
He meant how did she knock him out, she knew that. LizAlec shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You must.”
She didn’t. Ripping out someone’s memories wasn’t one of her regular party tricks. But then, no one had ever tried to rape her before, whatever Lady Clare might think. LizAlec watched the sandrat stare into her eyes and then saw him shiver. “Drink,” he demanded, noticing where he was for the first time.
The woman nodded towards LizAlec. “She already got dos. Nada money. Only an HKS. Sweedak? She raised her eyes, inviting Lars to admit how dumb that was.
“Here.” Lars ripped a silicon square from the clutter of talismans around his neck and dumped it on the wooden bar. Reaching under the bar for a reader, the woman striped Lars’s stolen chip through the slot and took the price of two tubes. It put the cashchip into negative, but not enough to argue about, at least not with a sandrat. With a sigh, the woman tossed the empty cashchip into a bucket under the bar.
LizAlec looked on, baffled. Not understanding why Lars’s cashchip was good while her own swipe card had been rejected. But even if he understood her unspoken question, Lars didn’t have words to explain that empty&fills were good because they were finite, while a card that drew a credit stream through a proper orbiting bank was no use to anyone operating on the edges of legal finance.
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