“What?”
“I couldn’t leave you.”
Gwendoline actually dropped the garlic press, she was so startled by the admission. “I would have gone with you. This…none of this mattered as much to me as you.”
Horatio gave a nervous snort. “You, a Utopial?”
“Yes! Me. It’s not a bad philosophy.”
He waved his hand around at the gleaming kitchen. “You wouldn’t have had any of this.”
“For fuck’s sake, I don’t need this existence to be happy. High-end consumerism is just a cosmetic skin stretched over real life. You and Loi are all I need. In any case, a Utopial lifestyle isn’t living in a favela or Southwark, you know. Everyone on Delta Pavonis is comfortably off and free to follow their dream. Well…okay, they’re astonishingly dull, but doing all right.” She quirked her lips. “And besides, I’d work my way up to their level one citizen status soon enough.”
“Jesus wept, when did you start thinking like this?”
“I’ve always thought like this. You’re the one that wants to tax every penny the filthy ten percent have and give it to the poor, to level down. I want to level up.” She picked the Krug bottle up by the neck and waved it aggressively at him. “I want everyone to have a penthouse and stupid Krug.”
“Nobody wants to level down. If you think that, you’re believing your own side’s propaganda. I just want to stop the monstrous inequality that Universal culture’s obsession with the Market has given us, to give everyone a fair share. You have no idea how bad it is for the people my agency helps, people stuck out there in the ribbontowns and on the edge of society—all comfortably out of sight from your gated towers.”
“I don’t have a side, and they’re not my fucking towers,” she yelled at him. Then regretted it instantly. “Sorry. Utopial society showed us the way, you know. We can have that now—and without their mad omnia ideology; all the industrial replication systems and G8s we have today make it possible. We were this close, Horatio. I’d helped put together something I was so proud of—a concept, an ideology, whatever. We were going to give a terraformed world a different society, the best of all we’ve achieved: a capital-based post-scarcity economy for smart people. Another week and we’d have been there, it would have started.” She stopped, grief and fright claiming her. “And now it’s all gone, everything’s lost. And you and I are still arguing over money and who’s got it.”
He put his arms around her. “You’ve just said it, sweetheart. Humans have phenomenal resources available now. Our industrial stations will be able to mass-produce weapons. We’ll have something to fight these Delivery ships with, you’ll see. This crisis will bring us together like nothing else.”
“Deliverance. It’s Deliverance ships we have to fight. And it won’t, because we’re all going to die.”
“Stop that. Think about it. If the Olyix wanted to kill us, they would have done it by now. This is something different. Maybe they will stuff us all into hibernation pods, but that gives us a chance. I’m not saying it’s a big chance, but at least there is one.”
“I love your optimism. I always did.”
He held her close for a long moment. “I’d like to come to Nashua with you. If your family allows it.”
“The Zangaris are your family, too.”
“Riiight. But running away from Earth has to be the absolute last resort—for any of us. I don’t believe Alpha Defense will sit back and do nothing.”
“They’ll do what they can. I know the family senior council is in session. I think that’s what Loi is involved in; he was advising Yuri.”
“Christ, does Ainsley have his own nukes? Or knowing him, something even more extreme? A doomsday bomb?”
Gwendoline winced. “Ainsley III and the others will keep Grandfather calm.”
“Ainsley being calm about the Olyix…I’d pay good money to see that. He was always so manically paranoid about them. He blamed them for me being snatched, remember?”
Her arms tightened around him. “I don’t want to remember that. I thought I’d lost you. It nearly killed me.”
“Didn’t happen then. Not going to happen now.”
“Good. And don’t worry about the family doing anything too crazy. Ainsley isn’t in charge anymore.”
“Seriously?”
“Not to be repeated anywhere to anyone, okay? Especially right now. But he’s just a figurehead for Connexion, visible on media feeds to keep the markets steady. Ainsley III and the council took control over a decade ago.”
“Christ. Why?”
“Ainsley isn’t very stable these days. It’s down to all the anti-aging treatments he’s undergone, we think. Some of them were quite cutting-edge, and he’d take anything that promised him longevity. He’s always been obsessed with that. I didn’t see much of him when I was a child, but I always remember him telling me that when he was growing up, the expectation was that his generation would be the first to live to two hundred years. Well, that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to be the first human to live for ten thousand years—and more. He’s still quite adamant about that. So with all those billions he’s spent, biologically he’s returned to his mid-twenties—and not just cosmetically. Yo, result! But mentally, he has problems. The effects some of those treatments have on the human neural structure aren’t fully understood, let alone curable yet.”
“Shit. That explains so much.”
“It could even run in the family. I was getting badly hyper tonight until you turned up. You’re my family council, Horatio, my serenity nark. So tomorrow we’ll start examining our options—really examining them. Because even with you here, my brain is too scrambled to think straight tonight.”
“Amen to that.”
“And you’re clearly a mess, too, because you know damn well I don’t like that much onion in my risotto.”
“Oh.” He looked down at the chopping board with its mound of diced onion. “Right.”
Gwendoline sauntered over to the wine fridge. “What we need is more Krug. That’ll help us focus.”
“It certainly will.”
Tronde woke as if he was clawing his way out of a nightmare. Not yet being fully conscious offered relief from the clammy dread of loss afflicting him at some elemental level. During the night, someone had stolen his soul.
Claudette’s god-awful fluffy pink-and-black bedroom came into focus, and he was gazing right at a charcoal drawing of an improbably equipped satyr riding his harem of big-breasted nymphs. Nobody wanted to see that before breakfast.
But it did make him acknowledge the root of his heartache: pleasure. Unique, overwhelming, multispectrum pleasure. The hifli had burnt out of his system while he slept, its absence leaving him with cold, sweaty skin. His body was just so much useless junk now. The pleasure he’d embraced last night had been incredible, his body properly alive for the first time ever. Hifli had made every cell function perfectly. Until then, his mind had spent every one of his twenty-five years maliciously interpreting all the body’s senses wrongly, but now he knew the truth—that every facet of experience was actually pleasure. You just had to know how to make the perception switch. It’s not dangerous, it’s liberation. He couldn’t believe he’d spent his whole life avoiding nark. Stupid bourgeois way of thinking. I’m a member of the Legion, for fuck’s sake, a real-life bad boy—not Claudette’s fantasy one.
He rolled over to see Claudette lying on the bed beside him, awake, staring listlessly at the gauzy canopy above them. There were tears filling the corners of her eyes. His attempt to sit up was greeted by a nasty shot of pain from his groin. “Shit.”
They’d fucked each other into oblivion. Which meant he’d finally fallen unconscious with his erection still switched on. Sometime in the night Nyin’s failsafe had activated and disengaged the Kcells reinforcing his cock. Not soon enough, though.
“Are you awake?” Cla
udette asked in an enervated tone.
He knew that quality well enough by now; it hailed him every morning after he’d dosed her with hifli. “Fuck off.”
“What is it? What’s wrong, babe?”
“Nothing! So shut up.”
“What have I done? I thought last night was the best yet.”
“Just…leave it, okay?” He made a huge effort and clambered off the bed. He walked stiffly to the en suite, every muscle hot with fatigue.
“Didn’t you like it?” she asked in a teary wail.
“Yeah, sure.” Even that sounded like an admission of guilt.
“I don’t understand. What was different?”
The difference, you dumb bitch, was that I was actually dosed on hifli this time. He wanted to go back and slap her. But he couldn’t. The Legion needed her, needed the refuge this house provided. And she had more hifli. “It was great, okay? But coming down is always shit. Right?” Saying it, lying even under these circumstances, gave him the push he needed: still the greatest, still the lord of control and manipulation.
He lingered in the shower, which warmed his flesh if nothing else. The bleak gulf of depression inside was still there when he finished, threatening to pull him down. He desperately wanted to go back there, into the world defined by euphoria, not wander through this drab, miserable universe that had slaughtered Piotr and Gareth. Just thinking about them—friends since forever—brought the hopelessness surging back. But I can handle it. I’m not weak like she is. I understand. I’m not fooling myself. Taking it isn’t addiction, it’s a choice to live a different life.
Claudette was asleep again when he made his way back through the bedroom. Tronde tracked his gaze across the walls and furniture. One of the charcoal nymphs had her face; he hadn’t ever noticed that before. His pile of clothes were still rank from river muck, so he picked up one of her robes and wrapped it tight around him.
Downstairs there was a smell of fried bacon and coffee. Damn, that smells good. He’d been a vegetarian for more than ten years. Why? Why did I do that? The reasons—self-worth, body purity—it all seemed so stupid now.
Ollie and Adnan had taken over the lounge, though they hadn’t bothered to open the curtains. They were slumped on the sofa, watching some kind of sci-fi drama shit in the compact Bang & Olufsen stage. Ollie glanced up and immediately grinned.
“Oh, man, that is the mother of all walks of shame!”
Tronde couldn’t even find a spark of indignation to fuel a gripe, so he just shrugged and dropped onto the sofa next to them.
Ollie’s amusement faded. “What the hell happened?”
“Nothing.” Admitting he’d let her slip him hifli, that the experience was a revelation, was too painful. They wouldn’t laugh, but they would be full of pity. He couldn’t stand that, not the way he was right now. “How’s Lars?”
Ollie and Adnan exchanged a glance.
“Not too good,” Ollie said as if he was in confessional with a particularly stern priest. “I think he’s got some internal damage. And his neck ain’t right, either. There’s a lot of swelling there.”
“Where is he?”
“On the sofa in that glass room at the back. I bunged him more sedatives. Moving about ain’t going to do him any good. He needs to keep still.”
“And quiet,” Adnan muttered.
“Right.” Tronde sank deeper into the cushions. “What about us? What are the police doing?”
“Does it matter?” Adnan asked, waving at the stage. “When this is happening?”
“Huh?” Tronde squinted at the sharp holograms of triangular spaceships, wondering where the laser beams were. Most Hong Kong interactives had them.
“Those are the Olyix ships. They’re coming for us, man. There’s thousands of them.”
“Huh?”
Adnan and Ollie shared another look. “This is a live stream,” Adnan said. “It’s real. The lownet broke it from some secret government sensors spying on the Salvation of Life.”
Finally, Tronde was shaken into taking an interest in something other than his own self-analysis. He peered forward at the images. “Real? You’re fucking kidding me!”
“There’s a whole armada of these things heading for Earth. They’re coming out of the arkship.”
“Holy crap!”
“Tronde,” Ollie said nervously, “there was a shitload of sabotage all over the planet last night. It’s still going on. Twelve city shields are already down. They hit the power grid relay stations and backup fusion generators. Sound familiar?”
Tronde told Nyin to open the news streams, filtered to Olyix events. The altme obliged, and the splash practically overwhelmed his tarsus lenses. “Oh, God.” His head sank into his hands. Tears threatened to come pouring down his cheeks. What he needed was some hifli; that would turn this disaster into triumph. “Are we part of this? Is Jade an alien?”
“The police think we’re involved, yes,” Ollie said. “They’re saying the raid on the Croydon power relay was part of the Olyix sabotage.”
“No! No, no, no. I’m not a fucking alien.” He suddenly noticed a couple of bacon sandwiches left on a plate and snatched one up. It tasted good.
“We’ve been watching the railway arches all night,” Adnan said. “The whole zone is swamped with cops, and they’re all there hunting us.”
“We hijacked some taxez and bugez to relay their camera feeds as they drove past,” Ollie said. “Forensics are tearing the archway to pieces. Everyone’s home has been raided. I saw my gran in tears. Some piece of shit detective was shouting at her outside our house.”
“It’s worse than that,” Adnan said. “We’ve been given Most Wanted fugitive status now; it’s all over the police and security web. Special Branch are going around to our friends. I managed to rip some chatter out of their comms; they think someone we know is either hiding us or knows where we are. They’re being kind of brutal about it. Aex, Jorge, and Karlsen all got taken in.”
“Karlsen?” Tronde asked. Karlsen was a good friend, a fellow printer nerd, but an artist who crafted weird acrylic runcolor sculptures. He didn’t have anything to do with the kind of deals the Legion was involved with. “Why take him in?”
“He knows us, and he was narked out when they busted his door down. So they’ll cold turkey him the hard way.”
“Well, shit.”
“They took Lolo, too,” Ollie said. “Bastards! Sie doesn’t know anything. Sie’ll be terrified.”
Tronde didn’t like the way Ollie sounded all defensive about the “not knowing” part but didn’t say anything. Instead he started on the second sandwich. “We could hand ourselves in,” he suggested. “Once they interview us, they’ll know we weren’t nothing to do with the sabotage.”
“Fuck off!” Adnan shouted. “I’m not having my brain squeezed out of my ears by Special Branch. They’re gangstas with badges, that’s all. You know half the gang members they rendition never even make it to Zagreus.”
“That’s just rumor,” Ollie said. “The Specials started it themselves to max up their rep.”
“Bet your life on it? Coz that’s what you’re saying. Shit. Hand ourselves in? Tronde, if you think I’m doing that, you’re batshit crazy!”
“I get it, though,” Ollie said. “This is big, really big. It’s not about raids and scams for the London majors, not anymore.” A finger jabbed frantically at the stage with its terrifying flock of silent alien spaceships. “This is the end of the world. The government is serious. They will hunt us forever. This will not blow over in a few days. Understand?”
“In a few days we won’t exist anymore,” Adnan shouted back. “Do you understand that?”
“I’m not sitting in this room waiting to be slaughtered by alien nukes. We need to get out of here. We need to get to one of the terraformed worlds.”
�
�The interstellar portals have all been shut, genius. We’re going nowhere. And if we step outside, they’ll find us. They think we’re enemy aliens! They’ve got fucking G8Turings on this; they’ll crack our escape route eventually.”
“There’ll be some portals open,” Ollie said. “You can bet your arse the rich will have their routes out; so’ll all the politicians. They’ll leave people like us behind to fight and die while they’re safe ten light-years away. I am not going to let that happen. I am going to get Gran and Bik out of here. I don’t care what it takes.”
“You are not leaving here! The second you do, you compromise me and Tronde and Lars. So, no.”
“Guys,” Tronde said, “you’re both right. We can’t stay here, and we can’t leave. So we need another option.”
“Go on, then,” Adnan said. “What is it?”
Tronde gave Ollie an expectant look. Which should have done it—Ollie was the Legion’s master of planning—but Ollie just stared back blankly. “Shit, okay. We have to contact Jade.”
“That’s your master plan?”
“Hey! Think about it, dumbarse. If Jade is one of the alien saboteurs, the security jackboots will be hunting her a damn sight harder than they are us. So she’ll have gone to ground. But if she’s a genuine part of a major family, there’ll be heat but we’re in the clear. More than that, she’ll be able to help.”
Third time: Ollie and Adnan gave each other a look.
“I can use a package that will route a call to her,” Adnan said. “One the G8s won’t find.”
“You don’t know that for sure. They’ve broken the lownet,” Ollie said. “Everything’s changed.”
“Half solnet is glitched, and even some of the lownet is out. And we’ve got this feed, haven’t we?”
“Okay. Do it. Call Jade.”
* * *
—
Jade arrived twenty minutes later, stepping out of a Rolls-Royce taxez. For the first time ever she was wearing an expensive business suit and black heels. She fitted the leafy street perfectly, another quality woman visiting the neighborhood she clearly belonged in. Tronde found the conversion unnerving, but then Jade always had that effect on him.
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