They were up at the bar, a cluster of large bodies clad in black straps, shiny chains, and hoods. Kaspar Murdo was also there, standing at one end, dressed in Spanish Inquisitor robes, with rusted iron chains around his neck, dangling a variety of medieval instruments.
Mellanie detected the largest power source in the club, her virtual vision locking the position in blue brackets, fortunately at the opposite end of the bar from Murdo. It was a cattle prod, one of many items hanging from the thick leather belt of a bizarreo femfeline. Her head had sleek black fur coming down to her eyebrow line, where her modified glistening red-brown nose jutted forward; long whiskers were rooted at the side of the slit nostrils. She wore a tight sleeveless black leather costume that showed off furry arms and legs. A long tail flicked casually from side to side as she talked to two other cat girls with more restrained modifications and a loosely chained boy slave in a toga with a worried expression on his face.
Mellanie shoved herself in front of the femfeline. “I need to borrow your cattle prod,” she shouted against the pounding rock track.
The femfeline yowled at a volume that rose effortlessly above the music. She brought an arm up and extended her paw fingers in front of Mellanie’s face. The polished onyx claws that had replaced her fingertips clicked out, their points a centimeter from Mellanie’s eyes. “Kitty says lick my litter clean, sweetie bitch.”
Her companions mewled their laughter.
Someone with formidable wetwiring, all of it activated, came through the club’s screened entrance.
“No time,” Mellanie said. She froze. Specks of silver appeared on her arms and face, as if she were sweating mercury. The blooms spread rapidly, obscuring her skin. Software flooded out of her, taking control of the organic circuitry that administered the femfeline’s adaptations.
The femfeline gave a start as her own tail snaked up and wrapped itself around her neck. It tightened. Her claws retracted.
“I’m taking the cattle prod,” Mellanie announced, and snatched it from the belt clip.
The femfeline smiled in excitement. “Yes, mistress, I’ll be a good kitty for you.” Her tongue licked out, a long obscenely flexible cord of wet flesh. “Hurry back.”
Mellanie pushed hard through the packed bodies, creating a wave of commotion. Behind her, Dorian caught it and began to thread his way toward her.
“Can you remove the safety controls on the cattle prod?” she asked the SIsubroutine. “There’s a lot of power in it. If I could use it in one burst it should be lethal.”
“Canceling comparative escape option analysis. Reviewing cattle prod systems.”
Mellanie reached the screened doorway at the side of the stage. “Open it,” she ordered.
The door slid aside. The corridor behind it was lined with small private cabins. She could hear moans, some of pleasure, some of pain. A whip made a loud crack. Someone screamed. There was snarling.
“Cattle prod safety systems bypassed. Battery discharge rate set to unlimited.”
She looked around frantically as the door slid shut behind her. Most of the cabins were occupied. There was a single emergency evacuation hatch at the far end. “How can I hit him with it? He’ll never let me get close.”
“Running comparative remote electrical assault option analysis.”
“Oh, hell.” Mellanie dashed for the escape hatch.
Dorian zapped the door’s lock circuitry with a single burst from the maser embedded in his wrist. A small circle of the tough composite smoldered and blistered. He pushed hard, applying the strength of his boosted musculature. There was a creaking sound, lost in the raucous music. The door popped open. He walked through the screening and into the relative quiet of the corridor. His sensor scans were immediately subject to a barrage of interference. Voices yelped and groaned behind the closed doors on either side. At the far end, Mellanie had got the escape hatch open. She jerked around. Half of her skin was silver, inserts and OCtattoos directing the interference directly at him. He scanned what he could of her with interest. She was doing the same to him. More effectively, he knew, but he could see what he needed to.
“No weapons,” he said. “How curious.”
“I’ve got a message for Alessandra.”
He took a step forward. “What?”
Her inserts transmitted an encrypted signal into the corridor’s small array. The sprinkler system went off above him. Water poured down as the fire alarm sounded.
Dorian gave her a pitying look as the deluge soaked his shirt and pants. “Nobody can hear that.” Beyond the shower, Mellanie smiled.
The cattle prod lying on the floor by Dorian’s feet discharged. The water allowed its full current load to slam into him. His body convulsed, steam fizzing out of his clothes and hair. He arched his back, screaming briefly as his eyes bulged and his tongue protruded. The optical fibers woven into his hair melted. Black lines appeared on his skin when organic circuits burned, sending out thin wisps of smoke to mingle with the steam and water. Flesh ruptured volcanically where his weapons’ power cells were implanted. Blood and gore splattered across the walls.
It took five seconds for the cattle prod battery to exhaust itself. When the current failed, Dorian’s juddering corpse crashed to the floor. The SIsubroutine switched off the corridor’s sprinklers.
Mellanie walked over and peered down at the gently steaming body. The legs spasmed a couple of times.
“I’ll tell her myself,” she said.
Kaspar Murdo was enjoying the evening. It was a good crowd in the Cypress Island’s club. He knew a lot of them, and there were several promising newbies. Everyone said Death by Orgy was hot. He was looking forward to seeing them perform.
Then this vision in a fluffy white top and miniskirt sidled up to the bar barely a couple of meters away and asked for a beer. A first-lifer by the looks of her. She appeared slightly shaky, as if she was shocked by what she was seeing and trying not to show it. That meant she was curious, and not instantly repelled. It was a vulnerability he knew exactly how to take advantage of. He’d be able to encourage her at first, drawing her closer, reassuring her until she trusted him. Then with that trust established he could begin her training.
His bulk allowed him to push easily through the eager authoritarian animalists and bizarreos who were gathering like storm clouds around their oblivious prey. He glared any objectors down, snarling back when he was barked at by a canineman. “This one is on me,” he told her as the girl proffered a one-pound note to the barman. “I insist. That means there can be no argument.”
She nodded with nervous gratitude, glancing at the instruments on the end of his chains. “Thank you.”
“Kaspar,” he said.
“Saskia.”
He grinned in a friendly, paternal fashion, and lifted one of his chains to show off the crude iron and leather device on the end. “Crazy, aren’t they?” he asked in a fashion that invited her to share the joke.
She smiled sheepishly. And Kaspar’s evening became the best in a long, long time.
***
It was close to midnight local time when the express from Paris slipped into Tridelta’s CST station. Renne was secretly delighted about that: it meant they’d get a look at the jungle. “Get us a riverside hotel as close as you can to the Octavious,” she told Vic Russell.
“Absolutely,” he said enthusiastically.
“The closest and cheapest, Vic.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Aren’t we going straight to the Halgarth team?” Matthew Oldfield asked.
“They can handle the rest of tonight’s shift,” Renne said. “Warren will let me know if there’s any status change.”
“Okay.”
“Gives us a chance to settle in before we see what Bernadette is up to. Don’t you want to see the jungle?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“Right then.” She told her e-butler to call Tarlo. “Where are you?” she asked when he accepted the call.
“Stakeout
in a garage on Uraltic Street. A police informant we interviewed earlier said Beard would be here tonight.”
“I hope you’re wearing rubber socks. Those car batteries have a lot of current in them.”
“Very funny. What do you want?”
“I’m at the CST station.”
“In Tridelta?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? Has Hogan sent you as backup?”
“No. I’m following Bernadette Halgarth, Isabella’s mother.”
“You’re doing what?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got Vic and Matthew with me.”
“Does Hogan know? For Christ’s sake, Renne, I thought you’d dropped the whole Isabella thing.”
“I had. But Christabel Halgarth put Bernadette and Victor under surveillance as a favor for me, I didn’t even have to ask her. Both of them have been receiving and sending some encrypted messages, nothing too suspicious; but today Bernadette just dropped everything and came here. Halgarth security has her under surveillance at the Octavious hotel, which again is a strange choice for a socialite like Bernadette. We’re going to join them in the morning.” She waited for Tarlo to answer.
“Got us a hotel,” Vic said cheerfully. “Not very cheap, sorry.” He and Matthew shared a grin.
Renne waved a hand for silence. Her virtual vision showed her the link was still active. “Tarlo?”
“Yeah, hi, sorry. Do you need any help?”
“Not yet. But if we do, I’ll yell for you. And that’s a reciprocal.”
“Sure. Thanks. Okay, good luck.”
“Yeah, you, too,” she told him.
***
“Paula, we’ve got an interesting situation developing.”
“What is it, Hoshe?”
“I’m with Nadine and Jacob on Illuminatus, running the electronic surveillance on Tarlo while he goes after Beard. Now Gus and Isaiah have joined us; they’re monitoring Renne.”
“So both targets are on Illuminatus?”
“Yes. Renne arrived twenty minutes ago, following Bernadette Halgarth. As soon as Renne got here she called Tarlo, then five minutes later Tarlo called Bernadette. It was an encrypted message and routed through a onetime address, but for once we got lucky; we infiltrated scrutineer software into Bernadette’s hotel node as soon as Warren told me she was here. We haven’t managed to decrypt yet, but the message Tarlo sent is the one she received. It looks like Tarlo was warning her she’s under observation. There’s no other reason.”
“Tarlo. Damnit.”
“I’m sorry, Paula.”
“Not your fault. I knew it had to be one of them.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Keep a close eye on him and Bernadette. I’ll join you in a couple of hours.”
“Are you going to tell Renne?”
“Possibly. Our priority has to be getting Tarlo into custody. But I don’t want to scare off Bernadette until she’s contacted whoever she’s there to meet. This is our first real chance to penetrate the Starflyer agent network. Timing is going to be critical.”
“Tarlo’s going to be wetwired. Bernadette as well, probably.”
“Definitely. Don’t worry, my team will be armed.”
***
The room didn’t look like anything special, a simple cube of gray walls and a worn carpet. Two polyphoto strips in the ceiling made it brighter than it strictly needed to be. A single air-conditioning grille high above the malmetal door hissed away unobtrusively. There weren’t any sensors visible, but they had to be there somewhere.
Robin Beard sat on a cheap plastic chair with his feet up on the table that was bolted to the middle of the floor. He didn’t look particularly concerned that he’d been arrested. But then, Lucius thought, he’d been in custody so many times he was familiar with the routine. Say nothing and wait for the lawyer.
Lucius followed Tarlo into the interview room. The blond surfer gave Beard a friendly smile.
“You’re not a lawyer,” Beard said.
“Smart,” Tarlo said. “I like that. That’s going to be helpful for both of us.”
“You guys are really going to suffer for this,” Beard said. “I was walking through a garage and you restrained me for no valid reason with undue force. You didn’t even read me any rights.”
“That’s because you don’t have any,” Tarlo said.
Beard smiled.
“Sit down,” Tarlo said.
The smile flickered on Beard’s face. “I am—”
Tarlo’s fist swung fast, smashing into the small man’s nose. There was a crunch of bone breaking as the chair tipped back spilling him onto the floor, limbs all in a tangle. His head caught a nasty crack as he went down. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Beard wailed. One hand was cupping his nose, with a copious amount of blood leaking through his fingers; the other hand was probing the back of his skull. His eyes had watered.
Lucius had taken a half pace forward, then halted, unsure what to do. He glanced to the ceiling corner where one of the visual sensors was hidden. Nobody was calling him.
Tarlo grinned as he squatted down beside the mechanic. “Always hurts like a son of a bitch, doesn’t it? Busted my own nose a couple of times on a board, so I know.”
Beard glanced desperately at Lucius. “You saw that. You’re my witness.”
Lucius managed to let his gaze drift away. Tarlo had told him to say nothing, but this wasn’t what he was expecting.
“We couldn’t get hold of a good cop to work this routine properly,” Tarlo said. “They’re all out on the streets helping decent citizens in these troubled times. So we’re just going to have to do the bad cop, worse cop setup instead. Know what? The boys in the office, they’re running a pool on how long you can stand up to the beating before you crack. I’ve got fifty pounds on ten minutes, but I’m gonna be on the level with you here, buddy, I’m not even going to wait that long.” He drew a slim medical infuser patch from a pocket.
“There’s quite a few street names for this; you ever heard of hardbang? No? How about painamp?”
Beard shook his head, giving Tarlo a frightened look.
“The thing is, this is like the opposite of an anesthetic,” Tarlo said. “It makes the pain progressively worse. Really, badly, worse. I mean I’ve see people screaming in agony from a torn nail when they’re tripping on this. So you can imagine what that nose is going to do to you, especially when Lucius here starts thumping it.”
“What the fuck do you want?” Beard shouted. His wide eyes were staring wildly at the infuser patch.
“We’re not police,” Tarlo said. “We’re navy. So there is no comeback for us no matter how bad this gets for you, how many of your rights we stamp on. No lawyer is going to come charging in to save you. Do you understand that?”
Beard swallowed hard and nodded.
“You will do as I tell you. Now do you want me to pump a dangerous dose of this into you? Is that the way I make you cooperate?”
Beard shook his head. The blood was running right down his grubby shirt to drip onto the floor. “No, sir.”
“Hey.” Tarlo grinned around at Lucius. “Haven’t been called sir in a long time. How about that? This man has respect. I like that.” He turned back to Beard. “So do I infuse?”
“No. No, sir, I’ll cooperate.”
“Good man.” Tarlo put his hand out. Beard gave it a mistrustful look, but eventually allowed Tarlo to help him to his feet. “You introduced a friend of yours, Dan Cufflin, to an agent who supplies people for illegal activities,” Tarlo said. “Correct?”
Beard frowned, trying to concentrate. “Yeah, I remember Dan.”
“What was the agent’s name?”
“I don’t know. He’s just the Agent.”
“Where is he?”
“Here, on Illuminatus, I think, this is where we normally meet.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only ever met him twice, and that was in different places: bars. We normally use th
e unisphere.”
“Today you meet him again, in person, on Illuminatus. Fix it up. Now.”
***
Jenny McNowak had checked herself and Kanton into the Grialgol Intersolar hotel on Lower Monkira Wharfside Avenue, on the opposite side of the street from the Octavious, and two blocks down. After that there wasn’t much she could do apart from load scrutineer programs into arrays in and around the Octavious. The registration array was easy to hack, giving them Bernadette’s room number, 2317, as well as a list of other guests, which they ran through their database.
After that, they’d managed to get up on the Grialgol’s roof, and position a sensor that could zoom in on Bernadette’s twenty-third-floor window. It was dark by then; there was nothing else they could do except wait.
Kieran McSobel arrived a couple of hours later, bringing Jamas McPeierls and Rosamund McKratz with him. There was enough room for all of them; Jenny had booked a suite in the Grialgol. After weeks in Rialto’s rock-bottom economy accommodation, and long stints cramped up in cheap hired cars, the suite with its luxury fittings, especially in the bathroom, was a pleasant interlude. It gave her a lot of satisfaction being in a more expensive room than Bernadette, whom Jenny had come to envy and despise for the ostentation she lived in on EdenBurg. She was looking forward to testing the Grialgol’s room service menu.
“Nothing much to report,” Jenny said as the newcomers began to set up a series of specialist arrays they’d brought with them in the suite’s main octagonal lounge. She and Kanton had arrived with almost nothing other than their standard field operation packs. Bernadette had caught everyone by surprise when she left EdenBurg.
Jamas established an e-seal around the perimeter of the lounge, then switched on a janglepulse in case there were any modified insects spying on the room. “We’re clean,” he announced.
“She’s had no visitors,” Jenny said. “And as far as we know there’s been nothing taken up to her room.”
“What about a visual?” Kieran asked, nodding at the tiny handheld array screen that was showing the grainy gray hash that was the feed from the roof sensor.
“She’s left the window screened,” Kanton said. “It’s just a standard model, twenty years old, but effective enough to keep out any passive scan.”
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