All the same, he hated working beyond the Edge. It was off-code as far as Lars was concerned. He was strictly a Planetside creature. It wasn’t just that the off-Edge blackness meant he burnt up precious lightsticks, or even that the fierce cold could strip warmth from a human body as surely as dropping it in liquid nitrogen. It was having to rely on an o/lung.
Even wearing his precious bubble suit, the rough-hewn wall was sharp against his back, where it pressed against black Kevlar mesh. So sharp, Lars felt sure it would snag. But that didn’t make him anxious. What scared him shitless, was the thought of getting his o/lung caught against an outcrop of rock in the darkness, ripping it out of his side to leave a gaping hole.
Sandrats only had one lung. To keep things simple, most sandrats were born with a right lung only, on the left the cavity space was hollow. It was a standard week five foetal modification, carried out when the gecko-sized embryo was still pretty plastic in biotek terms. Partly it was a straight DNA rewrite, but mostly it was microsurgery. You couldn’t put the blood/oxygen exchange in until after the birth, though.
Getting him lunged-up at birth was about the only good thing his Ma had done for Lars. Sure it was a primitive model, thrift-store cheap, a basic oxygen/CO2 swap that took its top-up straight from a metal o/lung strapped to Lars’s left side, but it worked and that meant Lars could roam the airless, lifeless mail tunnels that most lowlives avoided. That was the basis of being a good scavenger, getting to places others couldn’t reach.
It meant he could stash stuff too, well away from the WeGuard goons and LunaWorld security. And it let Lars drop out of sight every time the heat got too much: but it also meant Lars went through any vacuum with a bottle strapped to his side, ever-present, vulnerable. Ready for a rip-out.
Lars didn’t know anyone that had happened to. Come to that, Lars wasn’t sure anyone knew someone it had happened too, but it got talked about all the time in the simBars out on the Edge. It was one of those Cheshire-cat memes. It came, it went... and then it came back again. A half-decent memetecist would have had a field day.
“Ten metres, maybe twenty...” Lars was talking to himself again. It might be an unknown tunnel to Lars — hell, even he didn’t usually travel this far out — but there was an opening somewhere above him. An entry into Fracture. He could feel it. A shape of silence in the static of his head. There was a real difference in shapes between being in air and running a vacuum. A vacuum felt more internal, like fuzz, less firm. With air, Lars got definite shapes inside his head. Without air, it was just a gut feeling.
Just how hearing objects worked Lars didn’t know, but it did. Pulling on the thin wire, Lars began to haul up Ben’s ice bucket. He didn’t want the monofilament snagging when he crawled over the lip into the branch tunnel up ahead. The bucket came up slowly, the length of monofilament telling Lars how far he’d already climbed. Only what Lars saw first was an orange flicker, like a glowbug rising up through the darkness.
“Shit, Ben,” said Lars, when he spotted the diode’s warning. “I’m sorry, man.” The bucket needed feeding. If Lars didn’t get it power real soon that diode was going to turn to red, and after that to black. It had never got to black before, ever — though it got to red once, when the whole of Planetside’s power grid went down and the authorities cut the ring feed on the Edge to concentrate on keeping the tourists warm and safe. And the diode had got to orange a couple of times before, too...
Lars sighed. Okay, more than a couple of times, but it wasn’t because he was careless, it was just... Splicing into a feed when you were an illegal took stealth, skill or brawn and sometimes Lars was just running too much on empty to make the trade.
“So what do I do now?” Lars asked. But enough of Ben wasn’t there to answer, so Lars answered himself.
“Go in after them, of course...” What other option was there? She had expensive clothes, which meant she was rich. She’d had her own bodyguard, even if he was a crap WeGuard. That meant she was richer still. All his life he had been waiting to meet someone like this, someone who could help him if he helped her.
Ben needed a new body for a start. And — postcards or not — Planetside had a contract out on Lars. Lars didn’t really understand that part of it, but Ben had been certain Lars couldn’t just go back to being good, even if Lars wanted to, which he didn’t.
“Got to ‘fess up and pay the man,” was the way Ben told it. Lars didn’t see how this was an incentive to be good. But he hadn’t told Ben that. Ben was the clever one, except he’d got dead and that hadn’t been too clever.
Clambering over the lip, Lars pulled Ben’s head up behind him and balanced the ice bucket on the nearest ledge. The new tunnel was narrow and lined with polycrete. Big signs said something in a language he didn’t understand. There were even strands of rotting fibre optic strung along its walls, unscavenged.
Lars could feel them up ahead. Three of them. Not that he’d have known the number if he hadn’t first felt them back in Planetside where there was air. But then they’d gone for the surface, out towards Fracture, after cracking the security code on a triple airlock. But they’d reached the airlock in a vehicle of sorts, a NASA buggy, and Lars had been able to sense three of them up to then. He’d been riding the chattering mail drone, only stopping his tracking to assure it that yes, he was interested and no, he wasn’t bored.
They were near the old US Base at Placid now. Rubble and cracked concrete was all that was left on the surface these days, but once upon a time that rubble had been the US Endeavour deep-space observatory until a Chinese combat shuttle flipped its circuits, ripping the concrete roof open like popping the top off a can of beer. Forty died, maybe fifty... Lars didn’t bother with the figures, it was back in his granddad’s time and Lars wasn’t big on history.
These days Placid was an official US war grave, off limits to anyone without a permit. Though the number of fat Midwestern combat freaks who were granted a permit was staggering. Usually they turned up in Planetside Arrivals kitted out with real paper maps and those grey military-grade Rom-Readers, dressed up in black jumpsuits with eagle flashes. All equipped to relive a war that lasted three days and started by accident.
“Shitheads”: Lars hated them worst of all. They hung around the Edge where they weren’t wanted, trying to bum lifts out to Placid and talking flashpoint tactics for a battle they’d never been at. And, worst of all, started fights they couldn’t finish when no one wanted to give them free rides.
But that wasn’t who this lot were. No, these were professionals, at least the two men were. Like muscle for hire but slicker and richer; better armed too. They were the kind who could afford to do six weeks on, six months off, so their muscles didn’t waste. Not Luna-born, but definitely lowGee trained.
The third person was the girl. The pretty one with the strange clothes. Lars wasn’t sure how a straight grab like that could be personal, but in the room up ahead the two men had been giving her too hard a time for it to be pure commerce. If the words “pure” and “commerce” weren’t too big a contradiction.
She swore — they hit her, so she swore again. That had been the pattern right the way down the first tunnel until they hit the airlock. Then she really went ape, until her screams were slapped into silence. Maybe she thought they’d been about to do a half-black on her.
It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened to a good-looking tourist, not that prospective customers got to see that in the brochures. You could cabbage anyone if you did it right, loss them out, pull them back. Working body, empty head — it made for cheap spares or cheaper sex if you weren’t fussy about emotional feedback. But that wasn’t what this was about: Lars had already agreed with himself on that.
No one pulled a rich kid out of a line at Planetside just to cabbage her as soon as they hit the Edge. She was being taken out to Placid for a reason. Lars just couldn’t work out what it was, but he would... Lars settled down in the tunnel, pushed his ear hard against a cold block of polycrete, sq
uashing his balloon-suit helmet out of shape, and flicked channels in his head, looking for images.
He could wait.
Chapter Five
Internal Exile
“Fuck it.” LizAlec punched her fist against a wall and swore, more from anger than pain. Split knuckles hurt, but not that badly. So LizAlec punched the door instead, harder this time. Its slick metal surface didn’t even clang. She’d tried shouting, screaming, even kicking the door but it made no difference.
No one came. Not that LizAlec knew what she was going to do or say if they did. She’d tried, “What do you want?” But that worked no better than, “Can’t we work this through?” and “Do you know who I am?”
The door was antique, NASA-made, with some kind of manual handle that had no electronic override. It was also sheet steel laser-bonded onto a titanium frame. There was no need for it to be so strong and there never had been, but the first NASA ground station had been a belt-and-braces affair.
LizAlec bounced her knuckles one final time against its unyielding, cold, unrusting steel and began to cry. Tears trickled slowly down her thin face, smudging what little was left of her Dior mascara.
Laughing Boy and Mickey had stripped her, not just of the stupid, stinking balloon suit that blew up around her like some bulimic rubber doll every time she went through a vacuum, but of her skirt and blazer, even her black socks and buckle shoes. LizAlec wiped her wet nose with the back of a hand and, without thinking, wiped it dry on one bare hip.
God, she’d never thought she’d miss the St Lucius uniform.
But Laughing Boy had tossed her a paper gown, the kind hospitals used, then growled at her to strip. When LizAlec refused, he’d waved a shockblade under her nose and offered to do it himself. She’d almost tripped over her own feet in her hurry to get the navy skirt unbuttoned. Now she stood dressed in a cheap grey gown, small breasts brushing rough paper, her back and thin buttocks exposed to the biting cold. And all she felt, apart from fucking freezing, was contempt for her own cowardice.
Frustration.
Shame.
Impotent fury. LizAlec despised her own fear, hated having stripped to order and loathed herself. But most of all, LizAlec hated the darkness. Holding her split and bleeding knuckles to her lips, LizAlec sucked at the torn skin and didn’t know what to do next.
The grab wasn’t a set-up, not even a sick gag. It was as real as the salt-taste of blood on her lips and the gown that somehow made her feel more naked than if they’d just stripped her and had done with it. The tall man in the mouse mask wasn’t Fixx. When LizAlec asked, he hadn’t even heard of Fixx. Nor had the other one, the fat sullen slob with the mullet cut and wraparound n/Vision spex. Neither even recognized the classic Bach, Strangeness and Quarms, on which Johann Sebastian jammed with virtuals of Tom Petty, Lou Reed and Goldie. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair and LizAlec was afraid.
Not worried or anxious, but fucking full-on terrified. Fear gripped her throat with hangman’s hands, her bowels churned like liquid. She wanted to shit but wasn’t yet desperate enough to just dump on the floor. And the bile that pushed up into her mouth refused to turn to vomit, no matter how often LizAlec knelt on the black grit floor, clutched her thin gut and pulled upwards against her diaphragm. Water was what it usually took. Two small glasses of warm water and a finger down her throat.
Something weird was going down. But LizAlec was fucked if she could work out what. If they’d wanted to rape her, they’d have done it already. And rape wouldn’t exactly have been a novelty act anyway, LizAlec thought angrily, at least not to her. And it couldn’t be the money, because she wasn’t the richest. No one at St Lucius came richer than that tiny Chinese girl and the man in the Mickey mask hadn’t even bothered to look at Anchee. Shatter her teeth, sure, but that hadn’t been personal.
LizAlec was goods, nothing more, but, try as the girl might, she couldn’t see how she had any value. She wasn’t filthy rich like Anchee, or a princess like Ingrid Bernadotte. She wasn’t Kira, there was no CySat copyright on her looks. She wasn’t even brilliant like the Aziz twins.
It made no sense. But then, she’d been hanging round with Fixx for the last six months, so she should have been used to that.
Time passed.
She was going to have to get used to that too...
She did.
Chapter Six
Our Lady of the Crystals
Biting back tears. How the hell do you bite back your tears, LizAlec wondered crossly to herself, wiping them away with the back of her hand. Laughing Boy had just waddled in to slop her down with a bucket of water. At least, LizAlec hoped it was water: the liquid was certainly cold enough, but she wasn’t taking bets. Not that she didn’t need it, even she could tell she stank.
And she’d been cold enough before Laughing Boy appeared. In fact, the air was so chilled it burnt her throat as she pulled it into her lungs. LizAlec wasn’t sure if the two goons had known in advance that part of this strange wrecked building was still pressurized, or whether they just got lucky, but either way, over the last week keeping her warm hadn’t seemed part of their plans...
Now one of them was back again, wrestling with the door. The hinges were old, not rusty but thick with grit. Which was how LizAlec knew someone was coming into her cell. All the same, she stayed curled into a little ball in the corner and kept her violet eyes tight shut, even though the stinking cell was way too dark for Mickey or Laughing Boy to see she’d been crying.
Except it wasn’t the fat depressive or the man in the plastic mask.
“Lady Elizabeth?” Someone clicked their fingers and for the first time in days light pushed in against her scrunched-up eyes. Without even being aware of it, LizAlec pulled her sodden paper gown more tightly around her.
The new voice was cultured, its accent well-bred Parisian. Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio rolled away from the wall, blinking into the sudden glare. This was no simple lightstick like Laughing Boy’s. The new man held a small Braun lamp, the circular kind she’d seen on sale in the Rue de Rivoli. And his clothes were a whole gold card away from those worn by the two goons. Silk jacket padded at the shoulders to give him width, double cuffs kept closed with jade links, an obsidian signet ring circling the little finger of his left hand. Even his black English-made shoes were unscuffed by the dust.
He was tall enough to tower over LizAlec and he was so thin that it looked like someone had just lacquered his bones with skin and missed out the muscle. All of that LizAlec saw, but she missed the small enamel button in his lapel indicating membership of an Order that tithed five per cent of everything he earned and made Opus Dei look liberal. And she missed the discreet contacts that changed his eyes from green to grey.
Crouched back on her heels, bare knees tight together, LizAlec pressed her hands hard against the ground to steady herself and took another look at the man. He was in his early forties, maybe late thirties, with long swept-back hair that was flecked with grey. His face had character enough to pass for experienced, but was not so lined that it was yet old. The twist to his lips was natural, by the look of it. His sneer was practised, but not quite perfect enough to come from a surgeon’s lipid-coated scalpel. LizAlec had a nasty feeling she’d seen the man before, and she hadn’t liked him then either.
“Lady Elizabeth?” Impatience was what LizAlec heard and what she reacted against.
“It’s LizAlec,” she said shortly, pushing herself upright.
“No,” he said, “it’s whatever I want it to be.” And before LizAlec could reply, he caught her left arm and twisted it hard up behind her back until she thought the bones would break. LizAlec could almost feel his eyes rake down her naked spine and buttocks, and then he shoved her forward, bouncing her into a wall.
Shock, LizAlec told herself furiously, scrabbling to her feet and pushing her clenched hands into her eyes to stop fresh tears. That’s all it was, shock, not pain. LizAlec reached deep into herself and ripped out what she always held in reserve: ut
ter contempt for anyone who showed emotion, herself included.
“Arsewipe.” She spat the word back without having to think about it, looking the thin man up and down as if he was something she’d just stepped in. The tears were already drying on her cheeks.
“I could hurt you badly,” the man said simply.
“No,” replied LizAlec, refusing to drop her gaze. “You think you could, but you couldn’t.” She held up two thin hands in cold, mocking surrender. “Not that I want you to try.”
The tall man pursed his thin lips, as if thinking. So it wasn’t going the way he intended, well LizAlec was glad about that. He looked like somebody who was too used to getting his own way.
“You know your problem?” The man’s voice was dangerously quiet.
LizAlec kicked one heel against the cold wall behind her, then shrugged dismissively. “You mean, besides getting kidnapped by some fuck-head tailor’s dummy?” She watched with icy disdain as the man fought down his urge to slap her; she kept kicking her heel against the wall, waiting for him to tell her to stop. LizAlec was good at disdain: she’d had a lot of practice.
When the man said nothing, LizAlec shrugged again. “Oh, come on,” she said, “you can tell me...”
“You’re too like your mother.” He made it obvious no compliment was intended.
“You know Lady Clare...?” LizAlec stopped herself. Stupid question. With that accent he was bound to have met her. Lady Clare was an Imperial Minister, aide de camp to Louis Napoleon, the Prince Imperial, and head of the Third Section. Everyone in Paris who counted for anything knew her mother. Poor bastards.
“Lady Clare?” The amusement in the man’s voice should have warned LizAlec that the balance was shifting again and not in her favour. Though how much further it could shift against her when she was sodden, kidnapped, shuddering with cold and wrapped in a wet hospital gown LizAlec didn’t know.
reMix Page 3