reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “Still here,” Lars said shortly. He was busy going through Laughing Boy’s jacket pocket. Not that there was much. A cheap Jap inhaler of some kind, pure oxygen probably. Lars didn’t read Nip — or anything else for that matter. Other than that, there was a bubble-pack of derms and a transparent lock-knife with plexiglass handle and zytel blade, the kind of street-punk shit that was meant not to show up on m/wave surveillance cameras and always did.

  The nightspex were more interesting. The word “Zeiss” was laser-etched in blue round the edge of the single lens and the autofocus mechanism was undamaged, which was pure luck on Lars’s part. For a brief second, Lars considered letting LizAlec have the spex but then he shook his head. There were advantages to having her remain night-blind. Like, she wasn’t going to be able to see him coming...

  As quietly as possible — undoing velcro straps one at a time, rather than ripping them open as he usually did — Lars freed the o/lung bottle from his side and unscrewed its vacuum-proof hose. Dipping one hand into a balloon-suit pocket for the bung, Lars began to undo the front of his balloon suit.

  The garment might have been a cheap Korean copy of an outdated NASA model, but it still featured a double seal down the front: the first an outer flap that folded back to reveal two nanetic edges that joined and unjoined as if by magic. Once the suit was off, he’d be able to close off the hole into his ribs, plugging the circular ceramic vent with a replaceable neoprene bung that screwed level with his skin.

  Lars shuffled out of the suit as if it was an unwanted skin and stood naked in the blackness of the tiny cell, screwing the plug into his side. Then he got on with doing what he really wanted to do: take a good look at the naked girl. The most obvious difference between himself and LizAlec stuck out in front of him, but there were other, less intrusive differences, and not just that she had neater breasts.

  His stomach pushed forward where her gut was flat, and his legs were wasted while hers were still muscled, thicker at the top, getting narrower as they moved down. She still stank, though. In that they were equal.

  Briefly, Lars considered dragging the girl out into the passage first, away from the dead bodies, but decided not to bother. He didn’t want to make trouble for himself and besides, she looked glued to the spot.

  “Lars?” Her face still searched the darkness, scared and anxious. He’d stopped moving, Lars realized. She’d been tracking him by sound and now there was silence, broken only by the thud of some distant air-scrubber.

  “You still here?”

  “Yeah,” Lars thought, dropping to a crouch, one hand reaching for the transparent lock-knife. He was still here.

  The rape didn’t go the way Lars planned. To start with, yeah, but not by the end, no way... Moving silently in towards LizAlec, Lars squatted near her feet, not yet touching her, his brown eyes hungrily swallowing the sight of her. He was hungry in a way no holoporn made him hunger, frightened too. His whole body shaking as sweat gathered under his arms and trickled thin and hot down his ribs.

  Mostly plans just happened in his head, but this time Lars couldn’t suss out where to start: not when he had one knife and a pair of elegant legs to deal with, and only two hands. In the end, he jammed the zytel blade down in the dirt and grabbed LizAlec roughly by the ankles, pulling her towards him so she tipped backwards, and almost split her skull.

  “Little fucker!” LizAlec kicked out, the heel of her foot catching Lars on the shoulder, pushing him back onto his bare arse. She kicked again, freeing her other foot, and began to scramble to her feet.

  Shock was the first thing Lars felt, then burning anger. His shoulder was numbed down to nothing, flash-frozen by the blow. Still sitting on the ground, he drove his fist into her leg, hard, taking her down. And while she was still protesting, Lars grabbed the knife and held the blade to her throat.

  LizAlec froze into utter silence.

  “I’m not going to get killed for it,” she said at last.

  That was good, Lars nodded to himself in agreement, he didn’t want her dead either. With one hand he reached forward and found a wrist, pushing LizAlec’s arm up above her head. There wasn’t quite room to stretch her out, so Lars let go the wrist and grabbed an ankle instead, jerking her body towards where he was squatting between her legs.

  “Okay, okay...” LizAlec shuffled her body away from the wall, her words more irritated than scared.

  “Good,” said Lars, not sure if he was talking about the action or her. She was beautiful, he knew that. Blind to the night and not the shape he’d expected, but her brown skin was as smooth as glass and her violet eyes were lit from inside with splinters of fire. And as for her breasts...

  Lars drove the knife into the dirt next to LizAlec’s head and reached for a breast, feeling it small and hard beneath his callused fingers. Instinctively, his thumb and finger closed round a nipple and he closed his eyes, tasting its texture, hearing the soft darkness of the puckered circle around it.

  Desire exploded in his mind. Not just to taste her, to feel her Earth-hard body crushed beneath his, but to own her totally. To squat forever like a wine-dark memory on the inside of her mind. To hear the full bittersweet symphony of her fear.

  Lars sunk his face into her hair and inhaled, nuzzled his mouth below one small breast and bit, tasting sweet blood, ignoring her frantic lurch of protest. Hungrily, Lars uncurled the fingers gripping her nipple and cupped the salt sweetness between her legs, rough fingers curling up through damp hair.

  Salt, blood, darkness.

  He’d found her.

  Found what all the tri-Ds and holoporn couldn’t reveal.

  -=*=-

  Rape. Pure and simple. No excuses. No mitigation. Not that there ever was for terrorism, murder or rape. LizAlec’s views on that were fixed firm. It came from having an ex-Chief Imperial Prosecutor for a mother.

  She couldn’t see Lars but she could hear him, feel and smell him. He stank worse than she did, his fat unwashed body rank with sweat. She could feel him prodding clumsily against her and hear his frantic hunger sour into anger as he missed every time.

  LizAlec took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling her heart steady. Ignoring Lars as he tensed above her, LizAlec reached up with one hand and found his face, fingers pushing under the badly cut shock of hair to touch his temple.

  Lars stopped his struggle, briefly puzzled by her touch. And then fire exploded like lightning inside his head, knocking him from bright light into deepest empty darkness.

  LizAlec smiled.

  Chapter Twelve

  Wide-eyed & Legless

  “Here, put it on.”

  The police sergeant gave Fixx back his left arm, which puzzled Fixx since it wasn’t two hours since the squat Gascon had been encased in a slop-down, happily beating him to pulp with a short length of rubber hose. Only this time the sergeant was wearing his best uniform, his blue jacket pulled tight over his jutting belly.

  “Put it on, you fuckwit.” The sergeant raised his hand and Fixx ducked. Over the past two weeks those five minutes of explosive mid-morning violence had become something of a ritual.

  Five minutes wasn’t prescribed in any training manual, it was how long it took the man to get out of breath. Ten years ago the Gascon had been able to manage fifteen minutes, and ten years before that he’d been able to keep it going for what seemed like forever.

  The fat man sighed and pulled in his gut. Even he’d heard of Freud.

  The Préfecture Imperiale had more sophisticated pleasures at its disposal, of course, from the effective but tek-crude delights of a Matsui taser to the full cerebral meltdown of a Bayer-Rochelle parasite squid, squids were meant for medical use only, but it was obvious even to an illiterate that any machine capable of reading sensations could be reverse-engineered to provide them as well. And Fixx was many things, from a crystal-head to eight years older than he admitted, but tek-illiterate wasn’t one of them.

  Luckily, the sergeant was the old-fashioned type. Neanderthal.
/>
  “Put your fucking arm on.” The man’s voice was raw with a breakfast of Gauloises and cheap alcohol. Fixx didn’t blame him. The only way he could have hacked the sergeant’s job would have been to blunt his edges too.

  Sighing heavily, Fixx balanced himself on the hard plastic bed and slotted the stump of his left arm into a shining black prosthetic. The stump had been bleeding ever since the sergeant first ripped Fixx’s arm off and putting it back stung badly as prosthetic meshed with bloody flesh.

  No, that wasn’t the right description. Fixx shook his head, short bleached dreadlocks flicking from side to side like little snakes. Get the words right. Slotting on his arm didn’t sting, it hurt like fuck. And it would go on hurting until flesh healed and the nerves in his stump grew back through the chip gate at the hard/wet interface.

  There was a gizmo built into his left arm that was meant to deaden any pain, but it didn’t work, or if it did and this was it working, then Fixx didn’t want to be around when the gizmo hung, as it undoubtedly would. All his limbs had a nasty habit of going belly-up.

  Outside might be up two floors and along a corridor, but Fixx still knew it was pouring out there. Thunder crashed off the corridor walls, loud enough to drown out the screams of those in interrogation. Questioning took place each morning from 11:00 to 11:30, and in that half-hour the whole prefecture was a riot of animal howls. By noon the howls were reduced to whimpers that faded to silence. And so it would remain, until 14:00 when it started up again and the sequence was repeated.

  “What about my legs?” Fixx demanded.

  “What about them?” Pig-like eyes raking contemptuously down Fixx’s naked body, stopping at the oozing pink stumps that passed for his thighs. They’d been bleeding too, but then the prosthetics Fixx had chosen back when he was rich weren’t meant to be removed. They were the permanent kind, wired into his peripheral nervous system using motor nerves grown straight to Japanese silicon. The best that Chiba could supply.

  Not that it was difficult to work out why the pig-eyed bronze had decided to ignore the manufacturer’s instructions. Fixx was a renegade Jihad hacker, so violent even the Imams wouldn’t have anything to do with him. At least, he was according to the slab they’d thrust in his face, shortly after hot-keying his studio door straight out of its frame and just before some black-booted gendarme kicked him into unconsciousness.

  Which was kind of weird, because Fixx had always been too busy f’f’fixxing hoojChoons to give squit for politics — moral, sexual or racial. Anyway, he’d hardly been inside long enough to soften up some petty data thief, never mind the hardened Jihad fanatic he apparently was. But then, Fixx knew he was really in there for shitting on someone else’s doorstep. If that’s what you could call hanging out at the Crash&Burn with the jailbait daughter of some brain-dead policewoman...

  “Do I get my fucking legs back or not?” Fixx demanded, and was surprised to see the squat man hesitate. The sergeant was scared! Not of him, that was obvious, which meant it had to be his visitor. Fixx began to look interested.

  “Someone important?” Despite four years in Paris, the French that Fixx spoke was tourist-crude. LizAlec reckoned the English were incapable of speaking French properly and no matter how many times Fixx explained about being Irish, he was still forced to agree. English, Irish, American — none of them could speak real French, never mind hack a proper fifth arrondissement Parisian accent.

  “Your boss?” The sergeant said nothing and Fixx grinned. It was the wrong move — or it would have been at any other time. Bulges of neck muscles and knots of vein told Fixx the sergeant wanted to whip out the exerciser, but something made the man’s hand stop just before it reached his belt.

  Blind fear, for real... Fixx was impressed. He could imagine few things that could stop the Gascon when he was at play in his own cells: whatever was going down was heavy. And better than that, whoever was about to visit, they obviously had the sergeant by the balls.

  “Give me my legs,” suggested Fixx. “You don’t want to get it wrong...”

  The sergeant actually thought about it, his pug face tipped to one side. And he shook his head, flicked a lighter and went straight ahead, pulling carcinogens into his lungs from an untipped Gauloise.

  “Nah,” he said dismissively. “It only mentions your arm.” Checking a standard-issue Matsui pager inset in his wrist to make double sure he’d got that right, the sergeant nodded to himself and wandered away to check his appearance in a mirror. The uniform was fine but nothing short of a complete remake could have helped his face. Not that Fixx was going to mention it.

  Fixx hadn’t had that many new faces — in fact, Fixx was the same sex and colour as when he started out, which made him something of a rarity, at least it did in the music business. Though he sure as hell needed a new face now. That was, if he ever got out. Fixx sighed and shuffled on the plastic bed. If he could, he’d have hidden the stumps of his legs, but the cell had no blankets and he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen his clothes... Fuck it, Fixx smiled grimly. So he was going to have to stand on his dignity: so be it, because it was all he did have to stand on.

  Heels clicked on the floor outside and someone knocked, making the fat Gascon jump. God, Fixx thought to himself as the door swung back, the Neanderthal really was frightened. A tall major with high cheeks, thin lips and sunken eyes entered the room, hook nose wrinkling at the stench of tobacco and the acrid stink that rose from the floor where Fixx had pissed himself earlier after a particularly nasty blow to the kidneys. But, inquisitor’s face or not, it wasn’t the major who was important. It was the thin, bird-like woman behind him who mattered.

  Not that Fixx noticed the woman, not at first. He was too busy eyeing up the Ted Brewer violin clutched in the major’s hands. It was an original Gothic, body cut down to a swirl of clear acrylic, Ashworth pickup, Pirastro strings. There were fifteen working models left in the world, and that was his.

  Or had been until the prefecture blew out his door.

  After seeing what the police had done to his antique 303, the Thereman and his mixing decks, Fixx hadn’t dared hope the Ted Brewer was still unbroken. But it was and poking out of the major’s pocket was a matching acrylic bow, strung with purple horsehair. The hair was snapped but that didn’t matter, the bow itself looked fine.

  Lady Clare Fabio walked abruptly into the room, pushing past the major who stammered his apologies for not getting out of her way. Her greying crop was immaculate, her dark Dior lipstick perfectly applied. The only thing that looked out of place were the deep shadows round her eyes, shadows so dark that not even quality make-up could hide them.

  No one need have greying hair, enhancers could reverse that as easily as a laser peel could have taken the fine lines from around her blue eyes. Any half-decent hairdresser could have done both.

  “My Lady, let me get the man moved. The smell...”

  Lady Clare shook her head. “I’ve smelt worse,” she said abruptly, “much worse.” She didn’t bother to mention it had been many, many years before. Her eyes took in the cell, the basic plastic bed, the lack of sheets and sharp edges, the ceiling’s permanent light strip turned up to daylight and inset behind shatter-proof polymer. The place hadn’t improved since her time as a junior prosecutor.

  Everything was as it always was, including a man sitting broken-nosed and naked on the bed. Briefly Lady Clare wondered on whose orders the gendarmes had stripped him and then remembered they were hers. The man looked different to his official tri-Ds, but then, he would without his legs. His natural height had been 1.78 metres but after his accident in Moscow he’d sued himself and used the insurance to acquire the most expensive prosthetics that money could buy. Back on stage in his new legs, the man now stood 1.88 metres tall — so far as Lady Clare was concerned, that said it all.

  As did the fact he could have used limb grafts or, if he was squeamish about accepting cadaver tissue, he could have had limbs clone-grown in less than five months. As it was, it to
ok him that long to get used to his new heavy metal prosthetics. Lady Clare knew, she’d had it checked.

  There was little she didn’t know about this man’s history. And most of it she would have been glad to forget, especially the bits after LizAlec came into the equation. It had been going on for over a year and she hadn’t known. Minister for Internal Security, the ultimate head of S3 and she didn’t even have a clue until just before Christmas... When Lady Clare got the first hint of what was going on, she’d tagged Fixx in her head as a social retard but nothing more, not dangerous to her or LizAlec. Except that wasn’t how LizAlec’s diary read. It seemed this was the creep LizAlec had chosen as her first lover... The kind of shit who could take a fourteen-year-old innocent to his bed without even asking her name.

  Not that Lady Clare needed to have that last fact checked; LizAlec had thrown it in her face, on the drive out to the shuttle port at Charles de Gaulle.

  Pulling off her black ultrasuede gloves, Lady Clare stalked over to Fixx’s narrow bed and stood in front of him, legs apart. Three vicious slaps slammed into his face. Back, forward, back. The last blow toppled him sideways into a heap on the bed. Even the sergeant looked shocked.

  “Feeling better?” Fixx asked, pushing himself upright. There was blood running from a split in his bottom lip.

  Lady Clare shook her head and reached for his right arm, the only limb that wasn’t a prosthetic. She wanted to snap it at the elbow and grind the jagged edges against each other but she didn’t. Instead Lady Clare made herself step back a pace and let her arms rest at her sides. The man had no idea how difficult that was for her to do.

  “Finished?” Fixx asked and shot Lady Clare his most irritating smile. It wasn’t the brightest thing he’d ever done. Turning her back on Fixx, Lady Clare reached for a Korean-made ceramic-and-copper taser velcroed to the sergeant’s belt. It was Fixx’s bad luck that the manufacturers in Seoul had designed it without including steel.