Crash Deluxe

by Marianne de Pierres

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes were sharp despite the amount of alcohol she’d drunk.

  ‘Why?’

  She slipped open her coat and showed me a brief glimpse of the scarring on her ribs. ‘The organ rejuves won’t take. I can’t play any more. I got this . . . job and I saw what was happening. I wanted you to have a chance to prove that you didn’t kill Razz. You didn’t, did you?’ she whispered.

  I wanted to believe her - that she had my best interests at heart. But I didn’t know her any more. ‘Where’s Wombebe?’ I said urgently.

  Kat leaned closer to whisper but Esky Laud interrupted us, complaining to me about the quality of the band.

  I agreed heartily even though I wanted a gorge to open and swallow him for his bad timing. ‘Yes, they suck.’

  On my other side, Monk was back in Kat’s face. ‘Go and flirt with the male whore. It will annoy Laud. If you are good, I might watch you both later,’ he told her loud enough for me to hear.

  Kat’s Intimate brought her a tiny box. Obediently she selected a patch from it and slid it under her tongue. She kept her gaze averted from mine as she crossed the circle and slipped her arm through Loyl’s.

  Kat and Daac flirting.

  He seemed captivated by her.

  Laud got petulant. Monk seemed entertained by it as he kept up a quiet monologue into his comm.

  Inside me emotions welled that I hadn’t felt since living at home, and all the while Lindstrom’s sweaty hand roamed my back.

  Only a bit longer, I told myself. Just put up with this crap a bit longer.

  Sera Bau made her entrance around one a.m. as I drank straight from the champagne bottle.

  Lindstrom had wedged his crotch against my thigh, rubbing against me like a tom-cat happy to find a tree that his competitor had urinated on.

  Possession. I hated it.

  And soon it would be over.

  I felt the wash of Eskaalim adrenalin purge me of all the deceptions and the pretence. In a few moments I could be Parrish again.

  Without regret.

  Whatever the consequences.

  Finally.

  I idled in those minutes like a prizefighter preparing for the ring, a runner for the race. From a distance and without emotion I watched everything being played out in front of me. Daac and Kat dancing close, Monk working, Lindstrom pawing me, the sharp tone of Garter Thin’s voice pack, the whiteness of the fish against the silver tray the waiter brandished, the security drone.

  Sera Bau making her way towards her host. Gracious, powerful and dirty with death.

  At another level I ran a check of the things I had planned, right up to my feelings when the creator came face to face with what she had created.

  I didn’t contemplate failure. What would be the point?

  Win or die was how I would play it.

  Now, here I go . . .

  I keyed the numbers of the complimentary diary I’d planted in the Orchid House into Merry 3# and pushed connect.

  As I took the first step, Daac let go of Kat and whirled towards me as if he’d been waiting. My name formed on his lips.

  I faltered for the briefest of seconds, testament to the feelings I had for him, and gave him a smile. No apologies. Not angry. Not smug.

  Just me. Parrish.

  His face was stripped of artifice. He reached out for me but it was too late for that.

  Way too late.

  The explosion rained unique orchids and shredded bark chip down the mountainside on to the roof of the pavilion. I catapulted Lindstrom straight into Sera Bau’s closest bodyguard and broke the champagne bottle on the bar. I put the jagged edge to Bau’s throat and the whole party went crazy.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sera Bau was pretty calm on the face of it. More so than me. I was on an adrenalin rocket. I tried to look everywhere at once. Behind and above at the security drones, at Monk, Loyl and Kat. At the party-goers running for the cable cars and scrambling to hide under tables. Everyone was going somewhere.

  ‘What do you want?’ she breathed.

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have just asked?’

  Her perfume was so subtle and pervasive that I guessed it was manufactured in the pores of her skin. I wondered what other personal accoutrements she had. What weapons were concealed under the folds of her evening wear?

  ‘Strip.’

  Her composure slipped. ‘No.’

  I raised my voice to the knot of security that had gathered around us. ‘If anyone bothers me I will cut her head off. Even this expensive body won’t recover from that.’

  Their expressions showed disbelief and expectation. Disbelief that this was real. Expectation that the hoax drama would end.

  The moment stretched against a backdrop of confusion and panic.

  ‘Believe her. She’ll do it.’ Daac’s voice came loud and hoarse from the back of the group. I heard the emotion in his tone. I’d just signed a death sentence for myself. It bothered him and that made me glad.

  Now he was risking himself by adding weight to my threat - a sacrifice. I forgave him a lot for that.

  Laud’s bodyguards were straight on to him. I couldn’t do anything to help.

  His choice.

  Instead I sought Monk. His mouth moved, issuing instructions to his security.

  When he howled I figured that he’d worked out what the explosion had brought crashing down the side of his hill. Yet he didn’t look to me. His stare was fixed on Kat. The woman who had convinced him to let me inside his sanctum.

  What my actions meant for her, and for Loyl, and for Mal waiting for me on the top of the mountain - I didn’t know. But the thing had gone too far now. I couldn’t worry about their fates. They had to fight their own battles.

  ‘Strip now or I will cut out your comm implant with this.’ I held the broken bottle against Bau’s neck and nicked the skin on the side of the transceiver. From the confusion on her face I reckoned it was enough to interrupt her data-flow.

  She gagged and swallowed, then began to peel off her dress. The silk dropped to the floor like a puddle of tequila. I kicked it out of the way.

  She stood there in her underwear, her flesh pimpling and Monk’s cams recording it all. How long before he went LTA on what was happening? Or was he already? A real hostage drama of this importance from his raw feed.

  Would it be enough?

  ‘You’re going to bend down now and unstrap your shoes. Slowly,’ I said.

  She jerked her head in agreement and leaned away from me.

  I was watching the crowd so hard I almost missed her ambush.

  Only my olfaugs saved me. I detected the scent of poison soon as it was released from her sweat glands. My vision started to swim.

  Glancing down, I saw that she was holding her breath and I thumped her on the back. She took an involuntary breath and inhaled.

  ‘Switch it off,’ I gasped.

  She coughed several times and the scent abated.

  ‘Try that again and I will skin you.’

  I felt her first tremor of fear - an acknowledgement that I was serious and crazy, not just crazy.

  ‘What do you really want?’ she hissed.

  ‘Come. I’ll show you.’ I wrenched her upright and addressed the crowd around us, particularly Monk. ‘We’re going to walk out of here. I’m going to take Sera Bau for a ride. Then I’m going to bring her back. Nothing will happen to her. Clear?’

  Monk stood frozen, desire for revenge radiating from his skin. I wondered what he would convince the Militia to give me for blowing up his precious plants. Prolonged life in quod with augmented memory?

  To one side of him, Kat smiled and nodded. The faintest of movements. I was doing what she’d hoped.

  Whatever that was.

  We backed slowly off the dais. I held Bau by the neck, feeling her fury and embarrassment at her near-nakedness.

  I walked us backwards to Monk’s luge, counting the steps and the kinks i
n the path.

  Not one stumble, until one of my feet twisted on the luge rail.

  I fell sideways, dragging Bau down with me.

  It was all any decent sniper needed. He took a shot, grazing my arm, but I was so jacked that I barely felt the burning.

  Another from behind. This one in my shoulder.

  I dragged us upright again and sliced into the gel coating Bau’s comm transceiver. She screamed with the pain of an information junkie denied her juice.

  ‘Stop,’ she begged. ‘Not that.’

  With relief I heard the luge slide in behind us as I’d programmed it to. I leaned back to spring the hatch but as I did I copped a rifle muzzle in the face. A guard started to lever himself out.

  ‘Give me the bottle,’ he ordered.

  Bau relaxed in my grip, thinking she’d been saved.

  The guards who had followed me from the dais surged towards us, then stopped again as the guard in the luge exploded.

  Deafened in one ear, I ran a check of my body parts. Still in one piece but decorated with blood and bits of flesh.

  Bau screamed in my good ear. Those who hadn’t run to the cable car joined in - all the frightened, bright galahs screeching together.

  Who had done that?

  Kat. She was kneeling down near a bush, a pistol in her hand. She hadn’t used one before much. I could tell by the way she held it. It had been a lucky shot.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ she shouted and threw the pistol to me.

  I caught it with one hand as she ran towards me. Quicker than any of them. Quicker than me.

  I fired two shots to cover her but then the ammo ran out. A bullet hit her while she was still a few body lengths away from me.

  She fell heavily and Monk’s guards swarmed towards her.

  ‘Parrish—’ she gasped.

  ‘Get over here,’ I bellowed, caught between conflicting impulses. ‘Get over here - I can’t help you from there.’

  She ignored me, collecting her breath to finish her sentence. ‘I’m sorry about the kid . . . thought she’d be safe in the cage . . . Had no idea you would—’

  Monk was on her then, strangling her unconscious.

  Wombebe.

  The fist that had closed over my heart when Roo died tore it clean out of my chest. In the cage . . . I wanted to scream but I was on a road and travelling at speed - that didn’t allow pulling over to indulge in histrionics.

  I scooped what was left of the guard out of the luge and pushed Sera Bau into the small compartment, wedging myself alongside.

  She was still screaming at me.

  I punched her in the mouth as we shot to the top of the mountain.

  Monk tried to override the controls all the way up but my patch held and we made it to the top.

  Mal was waiting, guarded by another knot of agitated security.

  I pressed the bottle into the pounding pulse in Bau’s neck.

  ‘Tell them to get back.’

  In seconds they’d withdrawn without her moving a muscle. Either her comm implant was still working or she had a back-up set.

  I ran my stare over her. Where is it?

  I dragged her across the tarmac, making sure that her body shielded my most vulnerable parts. The wound in my arm had nearly stopped bleeding but blood and the leftover bits of the guard were pasted all over both of us.

  For once I wasn’t concerned about what I might be spreading with my body fluids.

  To my mind the Eskaalim symbiote hiding in Bau’s genes was already out of control. Why else would she fund a place like MoVay for ratings?

  I pushed her into the ’copter behind the pilot’s seat, climbed in and slammed the door.

  Mal lifted off on her pre-planned course without a word. I was growing real fond of the woman. She didn’t know the meaning of the word flinch.

  I clipped Bau on the side of the head. As she reeled from the blow, I locked her head in the crook of my arm. With a few quick jabs I gouged out her implant. She salivated and frothed at the sensory dep, so I dermed her with the medic’s painkill to keep her conscious.

  A mass of airborne lights followed us. Priers, Militia with one of the three insignia pulsing a warning and some private voyeurs jostled for position.

  We flew fast and straight into the dawn on the bearing that I’d given Mal. When we passed over the edge of the Viva environs some of the private light aeros dropped away but most of the convoy stayed up close and personal.

  I studied Bau’s twitches carefully to see if she was communicating on a back-up. Chances were that it was hard-wired to something vital. I didn’t want anything to happen to her until she saw what she’d created.

  Our flight path took us along the coastline between Viva and Jinberra Island. When we left the city, Mal veered slightly south-west, in over the wasteland and Torley’s. Every punter on the north side would have neck-ache from watching the air convoy.

  I imagined the rumours and the dread. If the Priers were giving live feed on something approaching the truth, Teece would be crazy with worry.

  Me, I’d gone past worry the moment I put a broken bottle to Bau’s throat.

  Was this how Loyl felt? Not bulletproof - judgement-proof.

  ‘What are they showing on LTA?’ I asked.

  Mal flicked around the frequencies. ‘The whole net is on us. The Pan-Sat telecast has been delayed.’ She gave the shortest, driest laugh. ‘You think you were famous before . . .’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Nobody remembers the pilot. Anyway, there’s other things for them to think about.’

  She pointed east and west. Behind us a trail of ULs flew like the frill of a bridal veil. Every punter who could get into the ether was up there.

  I suddenly had an idea that might save our lives.

  Mal’s, anyway.

  ‘Take us as low and slow as you can. I want everyone in The Tert to see this. And I want all the smaller craft to be able to keep up.’

  Bau twitched as if she could read my mind.

  I ignored her and pressed my nose to the window. In the soft pink smog-streaks of daybreak, the familiar sickness of MoVay began to unfold. First the sparkling blue strip of copper-poisoned canal. Then the bright colours of the rampant wild tek as it mingled exotically with the jungle strip.

  ‘Lower.’

  The fibre-optic towers had grown, soaring into the sky like bleeding glass fingers. We wove through them and I saw lumps of flesh dotted along their lengths - humans sucked dry of moisture.

  ‘What is that?’ Mal gasped.

  I didn’t answer but hauled Bau upright and shook her to consciousness. Her eyes took seconds to focus. Then they showed only confusion.

  I put my mouth to her ear and told her a story.

  ‘Once upon a time a rich and famous woman decided that she needed to destroy her competitors. She hired a bad man named Ike del Morte and told him to go forth and engineer the devolution of the human race. Experiment on the criminals and the poor. Do any number of things to them. Make them as grotesque and as terrifying as you can because I NEED BETTER RATINGS.’

  Bau’s eyes cleared slowly with understanding.

  I tightened my grip on her and slammed her face against the window.

  ‘See the ring of buildings?’ I told Mal. ‘Get as low as you can without setting us down.’

  Mal nodded. We slowed and descended further, the mass of the airborne flotilla piling around and above us.

  I wrenched the door back. Rotor-blade noise and the sweet pungent decay-reek of MoVay air rushed in. Ike’s shop of horrors, set in the centre of the old fuel farm, rippled with a life of its own. Crawl had smothered all the building surfaces like an abandoned furnished room covered with dust sheets. Only these sheets writhed and stank and ate at themselves.

  As if it could sense the nearness of fresh, untainted material, it began to froth, spurting crawl into the air.

  Or was it only crawl?

  Maybe my imagination had gotten beyond wild
but I thought I saw human shapes swimming in it.

  The shock on Bau’s face told me that maybe she was seeing something as well.

  ‘Take us just out of the ring of the buildings. I want you to find anything that’s alive and moving down there. When I tell you to, I want you to take me in as close as you can,’ I shouted. ‘And pass me the transceiver jig.’

  The Priers owned by Monk and Land hovered in close, camming everything. They were getting in the way of Bau’s Lash Militia, who were getting in the way of Bau’s Priers, who were dodging the ULs.

  Chaos.

  They couldn’t help themselves.

  I’d hoped that would happen. Needed it to, in fact.

  ‘Mal. What are you tuned into?’

  ‘CommonNet and OneWorld instream. Say the word and everything else will stop. Half the world is watching you already,’ she shouted back.

  I slipped the jig on and pushed Bau to the edge, forcing her to put her legs out. I crawled next to her. We sat side by side like two kids swinging their legs over climbing bars. Except that I was holding jagged glass at her throat and Priers were hanging dangerously close to each other to film us.

  ‘For the record . . .’ I waited a few seconds before I continued, long enough for on-line word to silence, to catch up. ‘For the record . . . I am Parrish Plessis and this is Sera Bau, Information Owner of DramaNews. I wanted her to see, and you to see, something she is responsible for. This is the Tertiary sector . . .’

  And I told my story. The whole thing, beginning to end, in hoarse, desperate tones.

  I finished quietly.

  ‘Two things worry me now . . . that’s all. One of them is that you won’t know if this is real or staged. The other is . . . will you care? I guess I can’t do anything about whether you care but I can do something to let you know it is real.’

  I motioned to Mal and she took us down within metres of the ruined MoVay rooftops. We flew along the diseased alleyways, alongside bleeding villas until we flushed out some of the remains of life, beastlike and no longer human.

  Shape-changers.

  I saw again the horror of what I would become, of what we all would. It renewed my absolute conviction.