Once this room had belonged to a Prince. It had been his study, but nothing from those days remained in the room to remind Lady Clare of the Prince or Alex Gibson. The oak panelling had long since been ripped out, the stone walls replastered and stippled off-white. One antique chair, one Third Empire rattan and mahogany bed, one vast wardrobe inset with an oval bevelled mirror filled a room that had a ceiling too high to ever know if there were cobwebs or not. Not that there would have been, Lady Clare used mitebots without even thinking about it, sprinkling the tiny nanites through the Hotel Sabatini to eat dirt, dust and crumbs.
Behind her — set either side of the over-carved door — were two oil paintings, striking in their honesty and cruelty. The larger oil was Christian Schad’s 1927 Count d’Anneaucourt, a portrait of a thin man in a black dinner jacket standing between two hatchet-faced women. The other showed an anorexically thin woman splayed on a bed in the background while another starvling sat in front of her, sad eyes staring at the floor, one jewelled hand absent-mindedly touching her own shaved vulva. It too was by Schad but painted the following year.
Each one had cost more than even Lady Clare earned in a year. Of course, Lady Clare hadn’t needed to buy them. Both had been bribes from a Flemish cocaine dealer ten years before, the year Lady Clare was confirmed as aide to the Prince Imperial. The dealer had bought them on the open market. Sotheby’s, probably.
Lady Clare sighed.
In the corner of her room a green diode was flashing quietly. But Lady Clare made herself wait until she’d struggled into a heavy red Kenzo dressing gown. Only then did she sit on the edge of her huge, unshared bed and power up her Toshiba smartbook.
On the screen a small envelope was revolving... So they weren’t using e-vid, which was interesting in itself, or maybe not. Lady Clare was finding it increasingly hard to recognize what was a significant clue and what wasn’t. But then, that was life. As her predecessor as His Highness’s aide de camp used to point out, jigsaw pieces only had relationships if you knew the picture. Though that probably wasn’t why he blew his brains out with an antique Smith & Wesson.
The e-mail was simple, even brutal. The life of Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio would be forfeit unless Lady Clare Fabio voted in favour of an immediate surrender of Paris to the armies of the Reich. So it wasn’t money they were after, Lady Clare realized with shock. The kidnappers didn’t even want access codes for S3’s famous, triple-encrypted orbiting database. Lady Clare had to throw in her lot with the Reich. Nothing else would do.
It was time to summon an official car. Always assuming Les Tourelles had a Renault that was still functioning — and even that wasn’t a certainty. But then again, these days what was? Lady Clare opened her vast cupboard and started to take out dry clothes, laying them neatly on the bed.
Chapter Nine
Laughing Boy
“If you don’t let me out I’m going to...”
What? Scream? She’d tried that. Howling obscenities at the polycrete walls until her throat was sore and her voice worn down to a croaking whisper. LizAlec had tried the lot, from dignified silence through shouting to trying to flirt with Laughing Boy. None had been successful — and now she was wired up to the eyeballs with PMS and felt like a Niponshi Zeppelin. Periods and one-sixth G didn’t go together at all.
Not that LizAlec knew how long she’d been there: her Circadian rhythms were on shutdown, her melatonin levels down to pitiful, her pituitary on strike... It was near impossible to judge time accurately in the dark. LizAlec hadn’t realized that before, but it was true.
They weren’t watching her. At least, LizAlec didn’t think they were. At the start she’d been embarrassed at using the bucket they brought her just in case Mickey or Laughing Boy somehow had her up on screen, but in the end basic need and the ache in her gut won out. That was on the second day, and when Mickey brought her food next time round he’d taken away her soiled bucket without comment.
They didn’t talk to her, neither of them ever did. She insulted them, joked at them, pleaded... but they might as well have been deaf. She knew just what they were doing, of course: distancing themselves, in case they had to kill her. LizAlec had no idea how she knew that, but she did. Maybe it was something about the way they wouldn’t look at her whenever they came into her cell. Though they used the light these days and had done ever since she’d had a visit from the suit.
The sequence would go: blinding light from overhead, clang of door as the outside bolt was flung back and then the sullen thud of feet and the clatter of a tray being slid onto the table. By the time her eyes had adjusted to the brightness, whichever one it was would already be on his way out, slop bucket in hand, while the other stood in the doorway holding a Browning pulse rifle.
“I’m due on tomorrow,” LizAlec shouted at the door. “Ragging, blood, period. What are you going to do then?” Like they cared. Other girls at St Lucius had taken the implant as advised, but LizAlec had been too bloody-minded. Low-gravity menstruation was unpleasant at the best of times — or so LizAlec had been warned — and stripped virtually naked in a cell wasn’t the best of times, or places, not by anybody’s standards.
She’d refused the implant, just as she’d later refused inflight sedatives and the stewardess’s offer of an injection for zero-gravity sickness. LizAlec didn’t want to be at St Lucius and she’d had no intention of letting anyone forget the fact, especially herself.
But that was then and this was now — and it was time to get a grip. LizAlec was going to escape. That thought was now burned so firmly into her brain she no longer doubted it would happen. Sure, doubt flickered somewhere in her limbic system, but it was mostly unnoticed. Consciousness was happening high up on the surface, fierce feeling tucked into the wet-flannel folds of her cortex as chemical intimations of anger.
Her breathing was steadying now. The last screaming fit was hours behind her — and even howling like a banshee was more balanced than punching the door, even if it couldn’t punch back. LizAlec wouldn’t let herself let rip like that again; histrionics trashed too much of her dwindling energy. Of course, she could always eat the reprocessed slop that Mickey offered her but every time LizAlec ate their food she dropped into deep sleep.
The first time she’d assumed it was just tiredness, but not the second time or the third.
Not that hunger was all bad. For a start it kept the terror at bay. The way it worked was that LizAlec was so busy trying to ignore the gnawing in her hollow gut that no time was left for all the other discomforts. Of which there were many...
Cold, dark and too small — her cell was walled with rough polycrete blocks and roofed with slabs of some shiny black stone she couldn’t reach. There were only three ways out of the cell. Well, only three that LizAlec could see in the brief seconds she grabbed each time her eyes adjusted to the light. One was the door, the other two were small air vents just above floor level, both covered with a steel grille and epoxyed to the wall. She’d already broken most of her nails trying to prise away one of the grilles.
Set into the wall at waist height was what might have been a fourth way, but LizAlec was afraid to go too close. Half the time the rusting metal plate radiated a bitter chill that leeched heat from her cell and body, the rest of the time it burned like a heater. The only time she’d tried to touch it, cold had glued her index finger to its edge and she’d lost skin from her fingertip trying to pull herself free.
“Oh shit.” PMS from hell, no way out and she didn’t even have Fixx to shout at... LizAlec rolled over in the grit and pushed herself to her feet. Three paces to the right, then a wall, turn ninety degrees and then eight paces to the next wall, six paces and a turn. Another eight paces and one more turn would bring her back to the original wall. And another three paces would bring her back to where she started. Now she knew exactly what a lab rat felt like.
Not expecting much, LizAlec pulled at the grille over an air vent. No movement at all. Maybe if she had a blade it might shift. But her slop
came on a paper plate with a paper spoon. And anyway a blade would probably just snap on her, knowing her recent luck. What she really needed was explosive. An H&K eight-shot would be nice, and maybe some molywire, toggled up into a lariat. LizAlec smiled to herself in the dark, surprised to find she suddenly felt better. It had to be all that screaming.
She took another turn round the cell, stepping sideways like a crab in the darkness, reading off the rough walls with her fingertips, Braille-like.
“The door’s out,” LizAlec told herself, knowing that was obvious. But then what was obvious was also usually true, or so Fixx reckoned anyway. And judging from the state of her nails it would take more than sheer will to separate the air vents from the wall. BioSemtex probably, if that didn’t take out the surrounding polycrete blocks first. Like it or not, it was time she got back to that steel plate...
Slipping out of her filthy paper robe, LizAlec scrunched the hospital gown into a tight ball, then changed her mind and uncrumpled it, folding the tattered paper into a neat square. Five layers of cheap paper was not much to keep the heat or the cold at bay but it was all she had to work with, so it would have to do.
Without her robe, LizAlec could suddenly smell herself clearly in the heat that rose from her body. Sweat, fear and shit. Unpleasant and feral. It wasn’t pretty. All humans must have smelt like that once, LizAlec reminded herself and then shrugged. So what? That didn’t make her like it any better.
Chapter Ten
Find a wall/Sit on it...
Lady Clare casually nicked at the purple lapel of her velvet jacket, even though she knew it was spotless. She had to do something with her trembling hands and smoking in the Imperial presence was forbidden. As was sitting unasked, interrupting, not paying attention...
Coolly casual she could do. Casual and coherent was proving more difficult. The Minister for Internal Affairs sighed, nodded and jotted something meaningless on a leather-bound smartpad in front of her. Affectation, all of it. She’d sooner have been using her Tosh, but a little pad was all tradition allowed her to bring to the vast walnut Council table. Still, at least hers was working. Two of the other pretty little machines had caught the virus overnight and broken up, which was what happened when Finance cut corners and allowed supplies to source their cases from steel rather than the pure silver that tradition demanded.
War or surrender? What could she say?
Lady Clare knew what she was meant to say. The e-mail left her in no doubt of that. Paris was to surrender on whatever terms the Reich offered. All of those little Aerospatiale cameras would be left in place, even the Ishies were to be untouched, free to eyecam history in the making. Nothing was to be done to stop the world from seeing the fall of Paris for what it was, a polite and stately diplomatic dance. Scrabbling blind panic would remain hidden.
Hunger ate at Lady Clare’s gut, heightened by the three scalding cups of black coffee she’d swallowed before being delivered to the Court of St Cloud. Her face was skull-like, hollow-eyed. It usually was, it was just that most of the time
Lady Clare couldn’t recognize the fact. Tapeworms and purging had once been the polite way of getting thin, but no longer. And it was a long time since anyone other than obsessives had actually needed to starve to achieve malnutrition — anyone rich, that was. Simple viral rewiring now speeded up bodily metabolism as efficiently as any old-fashioned drug, and for those nervous souls who didn’t like permanent solutions there was always an appropriate, easily prescribed enzyme.
Non-medical genetic manipulation was meant to be forbidden. But Lady Clare couldn’t remember how long it was since any of the Ministerial families had obeyed that particular law. If the Third Section had arrested every Minister whose pregnant wife had paid a quiet visit to one of FffC’s G&Stork clinics there’d be no government left. Even LizAlec...
Especially LizAlec. The woman glanced again at her own face, seeing it stare back from a huge Napoleon III looking-glass on the wall opposite. The gilt frame was oversized, vulgar and almost priceless, which made it fit perfectly with the rest of the vast Council chamber. The Bonapartes had always been big on ambition, but the same could never be said for their taste. Red and gold seemed to be the only two colours they knew. And what couldn’t be adorned with wreathed Ns — which wasn’t much — was covered instead with an endless row of Merovingian bees.
Of the seven people at the table only Count Lazlo Portea was actually ignoring her; the rest were getting in surreptitious glances when they thought Lady Clare wouldn’t notice. No one had asked her yet what was wrong, they didn’t dare, but the Prince Imperial would when his irritation finally got the better of his impeccable manners. As for being ignored by Lazlo, that wasn’t a surprise. It might be five years since the Potsdam Conference, but she still had him by the balls.
He’d thought himself so smart, taking her to his bed while the other junior Ministers sat in the mirrored splendour of the downstairs bar and whispered. But that simple act of sex had ruined his career, as Lady Clare’d intended it to. She would have been forced to promote the man eventually, anyway: then watched, half nervous as he clawed his way over the careers of his friends to the top of the shit heap.
But this way Lazlo was hers. Like it or not — and he loathed it — none of his colleagues distinguished between Lazlo’s climb of the ladder and his climb into her bed. In one simple move, Lady Clare had fucked, promoted and politically castrated him. It was small wonder the man hated her.
“Your Highness, gentlemen...” Lady Clare settled back into her ornate chair and keyed up the S3 data she’d been working on that morning. It was Saturday: the meeting was an emergency one. She should be keeping the Prince Imperial on message while guiding the others politely but firmly through the Cabinet’s limited options. Indicating, without making it too obvious, which one the Third Section felt was expedient. Instead she was politely, discreetly, simply panicking.
Surrender or not? They were waiting on her, as they always had, afraid to commit themselves without her guidance. Lady Clare looked round the table, discounting everyone except the Prince Imperial who sat resplendent at the head of the table in a black silk suit, his snow-white moustache and goatee carefully waxed. He was an old man now, but he’d been born as the Prince Imperial and that was how he would die. There was an Emperor, a true Napoleon, but he’d been on ice for a hundred years. At least, his headless cancer-ridden carcass had, wired into a Matsui cryonics tank, chilled and then flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen. His head was orbiting somewhere in a satellite. It wasn’t easy keeping a head alive indefinitely, not cheap either. Lady Clare had seen the bills.
Still, dialysis kept the blood glucose levels stable, nutrient IV solutions kept him fed, and pressurized/oxygenated blood kept his severed head alive. What passed for an immune system was boosted with selected lymphocytes. Of course, even without a body, the blood to his head still needed detoxifying, its isotonicity required maintaining and urea had to be removed regularly. The satellite had back-ups to its back-ups — and then there were back-ups to those. Downtime wasn’t an option for life support systems, certainly not for the Emperor’s.
Imperial France was a lifetime’s empire. That was the promise on which the Prince had been elected Emperor and President, and that was what was scripted into the constitution. “The Empire dies with the Emperor,” ran the last sentence of all. But it would never happen. Or rather, Lady Clare reminded herself, it hadn’t happened yet.
Surrender or not...
“Do you have an opinion?” It was Lazlo, icily polite, finally deciding to give Lady Clare some of his attention. The woman flushed, half rose in her chair before settling back in confusion. Despite the neatness of her dress and the perfection of her makeup, she knew that for once she wasn’t making a good impression. But then, who could, with 100,000 Cossack mercenaries camped around the city?
“Lazlo.” The Prince Imperial spoke only one word but it was reproof enough to make the Minister for Security sit back in his seat, his h
andsome face frozen into a sullen mask. It was weird, Clare thought, watching His Highness. Fifty years of ruling as a spoilt neurotic and at the first sign of real danger he came off opium, clean break. Just like that. Not one pipe in three weeks, if his surgeon’s daily report was to be believed.
“My opinion?” Lady Clare looked around the table, settling her gaze on Lazlo. Whatever the maxim said, there were times when you had to sweat the small stuff and as far as Lady Clare was concerned, that was what Lazlo was. “My opinion on what?”
“Do we surrender now?” Lazlo asked her coldly. “Or do we wait for another day, two days, a week...”
“Or should we fight?” Field Marshal Lena interrupted loudly and pushed his still-full coffee cup away from him in disgust, slopping dark liquid onto the table’s Maltese lace tablecloth. At seventy the man still only had two states, alcohol-induced sleep and full-on, testosterone-fuelled aggression. Lady Clare liked him and so did the Prince Imperial: it was how he survived despite not having been sober for over ten years.
“We can’t win.” Lady Clare said firmly. That wasn’t her opinion, it was a fact. The army was split down the middle, whatever the field marshal might say. Generals Regis and Dershowitz were arguing among themselves, with Dershowitz having already made tentative overtures to the Reich. And if Field Marshal Lena didn’t know that then he should have done. S3 had grabs of Dershowitz’s communications. Military crypt was strong, but there was no PGP in use for which the Third Section didn’t have a breaker.
“We can’t win...” The Prince Imperial repeated Lady Clare’s words back at her, his smoke-grey eyes watching her face. “But we could fight?”
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