“Need to sit,” said Lars and pushed past the boy without looking at him. The sandrat stopped at an occupied table right next to an over-chromed Cadillac jukebox and stared pointedly at two backpackers sitting in front of almost empty bottles of Kirin. When the grocks didn’t take his point, Lars up-ended their metal table with a crash, shattering glass.
Behind the bar, Jude sighed... It was going to be a long day. Reaching for her stun gun, the woman began to lift the flap.
But her presence wasn’t needed. Lars was already helping the tourists through the door and out into noonday heat hot enough to disgrace a hyperactive sauna, if only there’d been an inkling of humidity to go with it. The backpackers left without protest.
Jude figured it was the open lock-knife that helped the sandrat clinch his argument: though it might have been his bared teeth or the blood clotted down his chin that convinced them to try another bar.
Lars glared at LizAlec. “Drink,” he demanded, pulling the table upright.
Yeah, right. LizAlec passed him the tubes, watching as the sandrat ring-pulled both, ice crystallizing like frost down their silver sides. He killed one with a single gulp, then swallowed half the second tube before passing it back to the girl.
“Thanks,” LizAlec said sweetly, but it was sarcasm wasted.
LizAlec started to wipe the edge on Laughing Boy’s battle-dress and then gave up. The cloth was probably as germ-infested as the can. Besides, she’d had shots for every virus and infection known on Luna. The school had insisted. It was just a pisser she hadn’t taken that menstruation shot when it was offered: her gut was cramping so fast she didn’t even want to think about it.
The electric soup was cold as glacier meltwater, and thick like syrup. Sweet, too, but with a chemical aftertaste that should have warned her. LizAlec was taking a second gulp when the effects of her first swallow cut in, flicking the light level up a couple of clicks and putting glass-hard edges to the blades of the ceiling fan rotating slowly overhead.
Lars grinned as he took the tube from LizAlec’s unprotesting fingers and tipped the dregs down his own throat. Wizz, pop and bang — crystalMeth, seratonin and amyl nitrate. She didn’t yet know the effects, but she would.
LizAlec gasped, watching the room flick in and out of focus before it settled back to a hard-edged glow. A couple more of those and she’d either stop fretting altogether or go out and kill someone.
“Need power.” Lars told her. “For Ben...” The sandrat stood up, brushed matted brown hair out of his eyes and shambled for the door, metal lung banging noisily against his hip. Out of his tunnels, the sandrat was less fluid, less graceful than usual. As if he was only used to moving up surfaces rather than across them.
Lars was gone longer than she expected. And when he reappeared in the doorway his face was white under the dirt and dried blood, his brown eyes suddenly panicked.
“Ben...” He demanded loudly, then stopped. “Ben...?”
Not callous but genuinely puzzled, LizAlec started to shrug and then stopped herself, filtering his thoughts through her own memory to come up with a Matsui ice bucket. That was Ben. Or rather, what was in there was Ben. Except she’d never seen the bucket and she certainly hadn’t brought it with her. She was still wondering how to tell Lars when the need passed. Even across the crowded bar, he could see the answer scripted in her face.
The sandrat howled. It was a genuine, animal howl that filled the whole of CasaNegro, bringing conversation to a halt. This time everything did stop. Except for the Cadillac jukebox that kept spitting out its sour/sweet words of loss and lament.
Strat was a walled village, a jumble of adobe houses balanced on the lower slopes of a vast gap-toothed puig. Three roads led in, each guarded by scrawny pi dogs. Some visitors the packs let through, others were turned away with low growls and bared teeth. No one knew the logic of their choice, the augmentation was coded too far back for anyone to remember. There were three bars and only two served outsiders: CasaNegro was the larger, less intimidating of those, and howling sandrats were not on the menu.
Too tatty to be right on the tourist trail, a little too close to the crater’s entrance to be genuinely Sierra Mal, the CasaNegro’s jukebox was the stuff of skewed memory, full of white clouds, galloping horses and sad sunsets. Ersatz homesickness for people who’d long since stopped calling Mexico, Central America and the southern US their home.
The UN immigration laws of forty years ago had seen to that, stripping citizenship from any person more than two generations removed from a valid Earth passport. LizAlec knew about it vaguely, but only as history.
“Kid,” Jude said, her hand gripping LizAlec’s thin wrist. “You’d better get him out of here. My customers don’t like this.”
LizAlec didn’t blame them. Lars had his hands round a doorpost and was trying to shake it loose, anguished grunts coming from low in his throat. The post was real enough but its purpose was fake. The door to CasaNegro was virus-grown, currently healthy: it didn’t need props. But that still didn’t mean Jude’s regulars wanted the place destroyed.
“He’s nothing to do with me,” LizAlec said.
Jude’s eyes narrowed, though the smile stayed fixed to her tired face. “You dragged him in, you drag him out again...”
LizAlec nodded. When it came down to it she didn’t have any option. It wasn’t as if she could just dump him and run, not while he wore that bloody ring. All the same, she couldn’t stay in Strat or Fracture either, not long term. Come to that, she probably shouldn’t even remain on the Moon.
The tall Frenchman wasn’t going to know it was Lars who’d trashed Mickey and Laughing Boy. The man would send someone after her, no doubt about it.
“Can you use this?” LizAlec asked, pulling the Beretta that Laughing Boy had been carrying out of her pocket and sliding it across the table towards Jude. The woman covered it quickly with her hands, then glanced round the room. Everyone was still looking at Lars shaking and moaning over by the door.
“I thought you didn’t have anything to trade,” Jude said, staring hard at LizAlec. In answer, the girl pushed her hands into the side pocket of Laughing Boy’s balloon suit and pulled out a pack of shells, a second clip and the Zeiss nightspex he’d been wearing on his way down the corridor.
“That’s the lot,” said LizAlec. “They’re yours if you can get me to Earth.”
“Just Earth?” Jude’s voice was amused, the problem of Lars temporarily forgotten.
“Europe, Paris...”
“Honey,” the woman’s expression was sympathetic. “Don’t you watch the newsfeeds? There ain’t no shuttles to Europe. America maybe, you got the spread. But Europe — it’s closed.” She said it like that was obvious, which it was when LizAlec thought about it. Five days from the New Year was what the Met office had reckoned it would take for the virus to sweep Western Europe and hit the Atlantic, and LizAlec knew her mother considered that optimistic. No one knew how long it would take to cross the water.
“I have to get away,” LizAlec insisted. It came out sounding more desperate than she intended, but then Jude didn’t need words to work that out. Sitting on the wrong side of a bar gave you more than enough experience matching thoughts to expressions.
“Problems?” Jude asked.
LizAlec nodded.
“Men problems?”
LizAlec nodded again, thinking of the man in the Versace suit. “Yeah, she said, “men problems, mother problems and PMS bad enough to take your head off.”
“Okay, no promises.” The woman turned her head, shouting over her shoulder at the boy in the combats, “Hey, Leon!” The boy wandered over, just slowly enough to irritate Jude who was scowling by the time he finally reached their table. The boy smiled back, blandly, his expression hovering on the edge of bored. But when he looked at LizAlec his brown eyes told another story.
Chapter Fourteen
Killers under the Skin
Count Lazlo was upset, seriously cross — mostly with himself
for underestimating Lady Clare. It hadn’t occurred to him that she wouldn’t break immediately. That she might actually be prepared to ditch her little bitch of a daughter.
And now the girl had gone and he had to clean up after her. Lazlo had been waiting all morning for the rain to stop and it wasn’t going to happen: he was going to get wet on his way to the Tuileries. But there was something he needed to do first. Lazlo sighed, reached for a bottle of Evian and flipped open his Tosh. One minute thirty was what it took him to authorize the paperwork, falsify a few dates and leave a backdated trail of requisitions that hadn’t been there before.
Lady Clare had just ordered the release of two clone-assassins from the bioWarfare complex at Marne, always assuming they still had power enough to work the finishing vats. The request went out under her official PGPz crypt key and the cost was billed direct to her office. Lazlo was pleased about that last touch. He wasn’t stupid, he knew cost centres were an irrelevance with the Empire collapsing around him, but habit was something of which Lazlo approved and correct allocation of costs was the benchmark of a good executive.
The chance of someone actually back-checking those files was minimal. Paris would fall within a week, most likely days — certainly by the end of January. His beloved boss, her beloved Prince Imperial, both would be dead or on the run along with all their mindless, fawning officials. That was, if they didn’t come round first.
Lazlo’s original instinct had been to torture LizAlec on camera, not to death but enough to get Lady Clare’s attention. And that was what he should have done. But by the time he’d sent someone local to do the job, the brat was gone and his goons were dead. It wasn’t their demise that worried him — they were dead men walking, anyway — it was the timing. And quite how the little bitch had managed to bite out the throat of a man twice her size Lazlo didn’t know, but it seemed she had. Maybe shit like that was what he should have expected from the daughter of Razz...
Now he was faced with sending in the cleaners, getting someone to run her down and sweep up the mess. That was where the clones came in. Both were to be aptered for tracking and close combat using MS/Skillsoft, but it was shallow programming only. Though not as shallow as their given identities. They had names, S3 diplomatic passports and were chipped for loyalty, that was enough. It would have to be. His big problem was time. Getting them to the Moon was going to take five days: three to reach Mexico by zeppelin, half a day for a coyote to run them across the US border and half a day to grab an illegal launch from the Free Texas Airforce. Which left one for the flight.
Count Lazlo hoped it was going to work. It bloody well should, given what the travel arrangements were costing him. On his way out of his office, Lazlo wondered if he should have stipulated that the clones should only capture LizAlec, then dismissed the idea. Killing her would simplify matters. And since Lady Clare didn’t know LizAlec had escaped it shouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference when Lazlo came to put the pressure on. At least, the Count hoped not.
Chapter Fifteen
Last Supper at the Hotel Sabatini
“Shiori?” Fixx demanded, picking a garlic-laden snail out of its shell with a Napoleon III snail fork, its two elongated prongs spearing into the mollusc’s rubbery flesh.
Just thinking about chewing the thing made his jaw ache. Mind you, that wasn’t surprising, given the purple bruise spread birthmark-like along one side of his face. Rubber hoses might not break major bones, but they ruptured flesh and split skin effortlessly. It was a pity that mending the damage wasn’t as easy.
Three large medipedes stapled together the gash over his right eye, Lady Clare having jammed the ‘pedes’ jaws either side of the cut, breaking off each body in turn to let the insect’s death-agony snap shut its jaws. Neat, efficient and cheap — all you could ask from combat surgery. She’d learnt the knack from the Auditor-General of the Church of Christ Geneticist, except he’d been only a simple priest back then.
It wasn’t pretension or love for French tradition that made Clare serve snails. It was necessity. If she hadn’t needed the medipedes for Fixx’s face she’d probably have tried cooking them too. There was nothing in the city to eat, except a dwindling flock of pigeons and the odd especially cunning cat; even the rats were mostly gone. Lady Clare had found the snails in her small kitchen garden. While Fixx had found a tabby kitten on his way through the darkened courtyard, he just refused to hand it over for the pot.
“Shiori?” Fixx repeated, chewing heavily.
“Her street name,” Lady Clare explained, cutting herself the thinnest sliver of Mahon. The Spanish cheese was tallow-like with age and oxide-green around the rind but Lady Clare didn’t mind: being anorexic didn’t seem so strange when everyone else was starving too.
“She’ll be waiting for me?” Fixx said, for about the fifth time.
Lady Clare sighed. “She arrives Planetside ten hours before you do. She’ll find you.”
“How do I recognize her?” Fixx demanded.
Clare looked at him in amazement. “You won’t need to,” she said heavily. “Chances are she’ll recognize you.” Lady Clare looked pointedly at his black arm. She didn’t bother to mention the little dreadlocks, his legs or the unusual silver sheen to his eyes.
Fixx tugged the top off a bottle of Tuborg, crushing the cap between metal fingers. He downed the stubby in one gulp and added it to the miniature Carnac growing in front of him; a few more bottles and he’d be able to start on Stonehenge. The snails weren’t great, Lady Clare was prepared to admit that, but she still didn’t think they needed that much beer to wash them down...
Shiori was pulled off Lady Clare’s Tosh database, filed under ferryman and cross-linked to Charon. Twenty-eight years old, twenty-four accredited kills, born on the thirty-second floor of a slum project. It was all numbers where Shiori was concerned. Even Lady Clare hadn’t been able to pin a single emotional outburst on her. But then, you didn’t get to work for General Que and top the field as a reflex-boosted ballerina if you had flaws.
Combat clones were all right, but they couldn’t really think. C/clones just responded to programming. And bioroids were fine if you thought the ability to consider two million options in a single moment and reject all but one was the key to a good street samurai — but Lady Clare didn’t think so. She’d rather go for a blade who intuited the correct response first time up without having to first discard the others.
Wiping greasy fingers on a cotton napkin, Lady Clare pushed back her chair and walked over to the fireplace. It was stacked with unlit wood and torn-out pages. The pages were ripped from a first edition of Tipler’s Physics of Immortality, the wood a child’s smashed-up oak desk she’d found in the attic.
The fire lit easily, first time. Lady Clare dropped her match into the rising flames and reached for an Italian jug of beaten silver. With its ivory handle and Sabatini crest, it should have been serving chilled wine in Umbria, but it was what she used to make coffee these days, not that she had much real Colombian left. About half a packet if her memory was correct.
Lady Clare tipped three spoons’ worth of precious coffee into the silver jug, added rain water and thrust it into the centre of the flames. The ivory handle had discoloured with heat the first time she tried making coffee this way, but Lady Clare was past caring. Ruined ivory handles didn’t feature high on her list of disasters. The entrance hall stank of wet rot. The vaulted cellars were already full of Seine water, rain was eating away the Hotel Sabatini’s foundations. Without even going up there, Lady Clare knew the floor of the attic was turning brown with damp. It wouldn’t be long before water crumbled the ceilings in the rooms below and the upper floors began to fall in. And once that happened...
“Coffee?” Lady Clare suggested and held the silver jug towards Fixx who shook his head, reaching instead for another Tuborg. Crumbs of Mahon had spilled down his shirt and stuck under his fingernails. He’d eaten most of the cheese and fed what was left of the mould-rich rind to his bloody kitten.
So Lady Clare finished off the coffee herself, without milk. Her shaking fingers wrapped tight round the handle of a Sevres cup.
If it wasn’t for waiting on the kidnappers, she’d have been long gone, vanished into any one of a dozen pre-created ready-to-wear identities. At least, that was what Lady Clare told herself. But even as she thought it, Lady Clare knew it wasn’t really true.
As long as Paris was home to the Prince Imperial this was where she would stay.
Stupid.
She didn’t doubt it.
Deluded.
She didn’t doubt that either. But the old man wouldn’t leave, and nobody could make him; and besides, it was probably too late anyway. He’d be lynched if he tried to leave Paris and, even if he wasn’t, he’d never get past the army of the Reich camped around the city’s edge.
It was said that outside the périphérique Ishies and journalists outnumbered Reich officers two to one. Clare doubted it, but she didn’t know for sure. The Third Section’s central database was down, its RISC chips no longer parallel to anything, four terrabytes of hard sphere spun to a standstill for lack of power.
No, the old bastard would stay in the ruins of his capital. And all Lady Clare had to do was persuade him to surrender gracefully and LizAlec would be safe... but that wasn’t going to happen, part of Lady Clare had already accepted that fact. She wanted to be out doing something dynamic — rebuilding the army, ripping up cobbles to build barricades — instead she was sitting in a thunder storm, in the huge dining room of her own house on the Ile St-Louis drinking the last of her Colombian coffee, while the man she’d spent the last three weeks wanting to kill sat at the other end of an original Napoleon III table, getting drunk on looted lager. There was no logic to life and even less justice.
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