“Ready to go?” Lady Clare demanded — and thrust back her chair without waiting for Fixx to answer.
-=*=-
It didn’t matter to Lady Clare that the World Aviation Authority had banned all take-offs from Europe: she still had a Boeing shuttle waiting for her out at Les Tourelles. The last shuttle in Paris, the last in France for all she knew or cared.
“How long’s this going to take?” Fixx asked crossly. Thirty seconds of standing in the rain while Lady Clare locked her front door and already he was soaked through, icy water sticking his shirt to his back.
“To get to Luna?”
Fixx shook his dreadlocked head. He was keeping himself upright by holding onto the huge metal ring that acted as the door’s knocker.
“You mean the shuttle?”
Yeah, he did.
“A hour, maybe two... I’ve got horses, though,” Lady Clare added, feeling ridiculously proud of herself. She had, too, a pair of huge dray-horses stabled out of the rain, off the cobbled courtyard in what had once been servant’s quarters. Last time she’d looked in on them they’d been shitting dung straight onto mouldering Persian carpet, but what could she do? Her housekeeper was long gone and she’d shocked her bodyguard by sending him back to his family at Les Halles.
Rank sentimentality, Lady Clare knew that. All the same, she couldn’t wipe from her mind the fact that he had a daughter the same age as LizAlec. He’d wanted advice on what the kid should do if the Black Hundreds did take the city. Lady Clare hadn’t been able to give him any. Suggesting his daughter kick out her own teeth, then grease herself front and back, didn’t seem appropriate...
It took longer than Lady Clare had allowed to get Fixx onto the horse, mainly because he refused to let go of his kitten. But then, as if to make up for his incompetence, Fixx kept his seat well and it took them less than an hour to reach Les Tourelles, riding through the sodden streets. Hailstones hit the back of her neck like handfuls of cold gravel and beneath her black slacks the leather saddle was as damp and cold as bad sex. Though Lady Clare had to go back to Count Lazlo just to remember what bad sex was like — or any sex, come to that.
To make matters worse, the horses stank, steam rising in heavy clouds from their wet skin as their hooves slid on the wet cobbles, splashing heavily as the animals edged their way through vast puddles.
Slung across his back, Fixx carried a S3-issue Colt Hunter, ceramic-barrelled and stocked in grey zytel: another weapon virus-proof by accident rather than design. From habit, Lady Clare carried a steel-barrelled HiPower, except now she wore it openly in the belt of her black Dior coat. Her Colt looked sound enough, but that meant nothing. These days you didn’t know a weapon was infected until it blew to pieces in your hands. Lady Clare had no idea if hers would fire and was hoping she wouldn’t have to find out.
She didn’t. They saw no one — and if anybody saw them they wisely kept to the shadows. Not even the riot cops were out, which worried Lady Clare, given that regular patrols by Lazlo’s Compagnie Impériale de Sécurité was the last thing to be agreed at that morning’s summit.
The shuttle was waiting and so were her men. A fresh-faced lieutenant she vaguely recognized saluted smartly and stepped forward, his arm under her elbow as he moved to help Lady Clare down from her horse.
“Stop fussing...” Her words were clipped, cross; snapped out before she had time to consider then. The boy stepped back, stony-faced, and Lady Clare cursed herself. He’d been standing in the rain for what...? Five hours minimum. And not even because she’d told him to, but because she’d instructed her deputy who’d ordered someone else who’d finally dumped the job on the boy in front of her.
The city was rotting around him, self-confessed/self-elected fascists were camped less than two miles away, it was raining in a deluge fit to drown them, and he was upset because she’d slighted his offer of help. The woman sighed. Here she was having a hard time getting her own head round the concept of duty while this kid took his for granted.
“I’m sorry, that was unfair,” said Lady Clare and then stopped, uncertain where to go from there. As far as she could remember she’d never apologized to a junior in living memory. She glanced up at the night sky, then looked quickly away as drops of water hammered into her tired eyes. “It’s this rain,” she said. “Is the shuttle ready?”
“Yes, Ma’am.” He smiled uncertainly, keeping his face neutral. She could imagine what the Guard had been saying about her. Roughly what she’d have said about anyone stupid enough to offer up such an idiot plan. Launching a shuttle at night, with a hostile army only three klicks distant was bad enough. But to launch an old-model Boeing X3 from a city riddled with Azerbaijani virus to a destination that wasn’t accepting incoming flights, at least not from Europe... The days that Lady Clare thought she was losing it were beginning to outnumber those when she thought she wasn’t.
The young lieutenant had no way of knowing just how much of the shuttle’s make-up was steel, but Lady Clare knew, more or less exactly. Not that she was going to tell him, or Fixx. According to stats from the S3 mainframe before it took its first nosedive, over half of the Boeing’s shell was pre-cast polycrete, pressure-treated with super-critical CO2, twenty-six per cent was organic polymer or optic fibre and thirteen per cent of the bloody thing was titanium/steel alloy — and most of that was structural.
The night before last, sleepless and wired on too much coffee, Lady Clare had developed a theory that the rain was holding the virus at bay. The nanites were like tiny insects blasted out of the sky by heavy droplets, unable to get started before they got washed off. She didn’t know if she really believed it, in fact she was pretty sure she didn’t, but it was her justification for the risk Fixx was about to take.
“Is it the Prince Imperial?” The lieutenant was at her side, his dark eyes fixed on the hunched man who was swaying gently from side to side, his head hidden beneath a huge woollen hood. It appeared to the lieutenant that the man had a tiny bedraggled kitten folded into the flaps of his cloak.
Lady Clare shook her head. “No.” She said it sadly. “His Highness is refusing to leave... This is...” Lady Clare hesitated and then caught herself; why not start a useful rumour? God knew, she could do with all the help she could get. “This is a secret and important mission. One that could save the city. Secret and important...”
So fucking secret, thought Lady Clare, that even she didn’t really know why she was doing whatever it was she was doing. Still, that applied to most of her recent life if she thought about it: which she didn’t intend to, unless she couldn’t help herself.
Lady Clare snorted, not knowing which she thought was worse. To fool yourself, justify yourself or just not care. Well, at least she still cared, more or less.
“Okay, let’s go,” she told the rider and watched the swathed figure clamber clumsily down from his dray-horse. Lady Clare waited while Fixx looked at the lieutenant, then at the stubby silhouette of the Boeing, void-black against the darkness of the night sky. It had basic stealth capabilities, not to mention a prophylactic sheath of ferrite supposedly capable of rendering it radar-invisible by absorbing radio waves. Though how much of that was left was anybody’s guess.
“This is it?” Fixx looked amused, suddenly alive, sober even. His silver eyes swept over the rain-stained hull, the pools of flood water building up round the ramp. “Very...” he searched for the word, black cloak flung back to reveal the Extopian eye-candy of his metal arm and legs. He was performing, Lady Clare realized, and he was doing it well.
The take-off crew watched surreptitiously, while the lieutenant was more open about it, but all of them were looking at Fixx and it was obvious to Lady Clare that, even drenched and cold, the Fixxer had come awake, revelling in their attention.
“Well?” She said at last, giving Fixx his feed line.
“Very... retro.” Fixx smiled, nodded to Lady Clare and made for the ladder without looking back. He climbed it in huge, easy steps, his legs powering h
im effortlessly up wet rungs.
“A borg!” Behind her the lieutenant sounded impressed despite himself, and Clare nodded. Well, he was, sort of... And just because she hated the poisonous shit didn’t meant she couldn’t recognize a good performance when she saw one.
The hatch shut itself, the hiss of its hydraulics lost in the howling rain, and then the X3 began to count itself down, its voice an irritating whine. Water was trickling down her back, cold rivulets using her spine as a roadway before soaking into her waistband. Lady Clare’d always thought “brain-freeze” was just another of LizAlec’s clichés, but she was beginning to learn differently. Her neck burned with tension and both breasts ached with cold but it was Lady Clare’s forehead that was the focus of real, concrete pain.
All the same, she stayed to watch the X3’s lift-off and saw it rise almost silently into the night to be swallowed by dense rain cloud. No guns opened fire from out beyond the Bois, no G2A missiles ripped through the sky.
The bloody thing was launched and Fixx with it. Now he just had to prove he was as good at performing as he thought he was.
Chapter Sixteen
TsujiGirl
“In between this moon and you...” Fixx hit a key, disliked what he heard and hit another, wiping his previous edit. He was enjoying himself, which was more than could be said for the kitten.
Ghost bounced into an old-fashioned plastic deck, accidentally trod on a pressure pad and the simulacrum of Ludwig Van Beethoven died mid-chord, replaced by an amphetamined-up Mozart who promptly changed both key and tempo. Fixx didn’t mind too much: he just remixed one into the other and ran a long Ginger Baker drum fill under both.
Currently he had a seventeen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus on keyboard — at least he did now, thanks to Ghost — Goldie was in there on vocals, +N2X was on korg and 303 and Fixx was thinking of using either Lennon and McCartney or the Gallaghers for backing vocals, except he couldn’t find the right file.
Flicking fingers across the deck, Fixx keyed in echo-shredded birdsong and a CySat C3N sound-grab of a tank crushing a barricade in Tashkent. He riffed machine-gun fire with rolling static and looped the lot before Ginger Baker had even finished on snares.
Sweet as honey and with more bloody layers than an over-thick piece of baklava.
Beneath it all was static from deep space, laid over a click track of quasar pulses, and at its heart was coded a fractal equation that turned and twisted on itself, opening sounds out like the petals of a never-ending flower.
LISA was going to love it. Sure, it was five years since he’d had a thing going with LISA but her tastes couldn’t have changed that much. That was the difference between AIs and humans: AIs didn’t have the capacity to make themselves over or drop out of sight. Maybe somewhere an AI had walked out on its job or nipped out to get a six-pack and never come home, but if it had then Fixx had never heard of it.
Sound echoed out of every speaker around him, danced as exploding lines of light across the black glass of a sillyscope. At least, Fixx figured that was what it was before he ripped out its streamers and wired them to the deck’s digital feed.
Back at Sony in the old days, he’d have added vision, something bittersweet lifted from a newsfeed, maybe thrown in some obscure scents, morphed up a tri-D Laura or two. But this wasn’t Sony — it was some fucked-up, cramped, still-damp cabin of an out-of-date Boeing X3 shuttle. And he was running out of time.
“Shit, Ghost, what we going to do?”
The kitten said nothing, Fixx didn’t expect it to. Black and scrawny as an empty purse, Ghost was going to be his good-luck talisman. Sure, anyone else would probably have eaten it, but Fixx prided himself on not being anyone else. That had been the whole basis of his magnesium-brief flash of fame.
Though, looking at the animal retching its guts out, Fixx wondered if it wouldn’t have been kinder just to let Lady Clare cook it. He might be strapped in but the terrified kitten was making the trip in freefall and pellets of cat shit hung in the air like black bees. Having seen the result of doing it once, Fixx was managing to avoid the urge to swat them again.
Okay, party time. Popping his last bubble of paraDerm, Fixx scratched the underside of his good wrist and slapped the patch into position, feeling warmth spread up though his arm. Inside his head, dorphs flooded in, his limbic system kicked up a gear and he forgot completely about his bruised jaw. Bayer-Rochelle had designed the derm to work on unbroken skin, but Fixx couldn’t be bothered to wait around while the analgesic soaked through.
There were three things he needed to do and, as always when Fixx couldn’t crack the priorities, he was busy doing none of them. If he’d been bothered enough, he could have downloaded an MS Routesoft walk-through for Planetside, checked out in advance where the grab happened. But the stop/start jumpiness of commercial VGR made him sick, so he was going to apt his memory instead. The only problem was, to get a current workable remembrance agent he needed access to LISA — and these days it seemed she had more hard armament slapped around her than Paris.
LizAlec was too young to remember black ice, but Fixx wasn’t. It was just a fuck of a long time since he’d done anything about it except talk.
“Ain’t that always the way?” The cat said nothing, just kept on looking sick. Fixx didn’t blame it. Approaching them was the bright side of the Moon, thousands of miles of shit-coloured, pock-marked rock with the occasional crater domed over in water and glass or roofed with earth. It made Paris look good.
Music for LISA, an APTR link for him via a pair of wraparounds, and what for the X3...? Authorization, and quick.
“Up/L youse l/code... ization need now.” The voice from Planetside traffic control was tired and irritated, reassuringly human. “Up/L youse l/code...” Give it another thousand klicks and that voice would be swearing or shouting instructions to Planetside defence control to blow him out of the sky.
Fixx grinned. Fifteen thousand miles back, the voice had been an unheard digital bitstream between his shuttle and the traffic semiAI. Five thousand miles later the voice switched to audible bio. Bringing in a human had only just happened. Fixx could imagine the bio and the trafficAI being seriously hacked off.
He was being tracked, no doubt about it. Had Planetside known he was fresh up from Paris they’d have burnt him swifter than swatting a fly. Even then, with the X3 reconfigured by a particle beam, chances were they’d be too late. For all Fixx knew, viruses had been falling like dust off his X3 even since it came into low orbit. Or maybe they all went belly-up and froze in mid-space. How the fuck was he to know? Drugs and music was his thing, not biologically grounded base-level atomic assemblers.
What he had worked out, sitting with his spewing kitten and the flight console he’d rewired as a mixing deck, was that if the shuttle was infected then he was a plague carrier. It wasn’t a good feeling. On Earth, ferroconcrete buildings tumbled down if they got infected. Up here, craters weren’t going to fall, they were going to blow open, crack apart.
Fucking darkness. Fucking cold.
Hollowed out.
How many ruptured airlocks would it take to gut every tourist in LunaWorld? Fixx didn’t know but he wondered about it, in the bit of his cortex not worrying about bluffing the traffic AI or wondering if LISA really would, after five years, forgive him in return for a piece of baroque, self-writing North African trance. And it was hard not to wonder if Lady Clare really understood she risked condemning an entire arcology to death.
If the answer was yes, then Fixx decided the bitch had to be even more ruthless than LizAlec made out. And suppose it was no? That didn’t make him feel any better.
-=*=-
Fixx came into landing orbit just as the cargo shuttle carrying LizAlec and Lars started its drop to The Arc. They weren’t listed on the manifest. Unless they were on there as assorted animals, because that’s what the shuttle was carrying. At Jude’s suggestion, LizAlec had cropped her hair and wrapped her head in a white cotton headscarf, wrapped tightly around her
head and half-covering her face. Unwrapped, she looked like a rich-kid punk for Chrysler, but wearing the scarf LizAlec looked like a tourist-stall Madonna, the kind with a light in the base.
LizAlec knew all about The Arc, she just didn’t know that was where she was going. Leon, the smart-arse boy from CasaNegro who got them on board the Boeing X7, had promised the shuttle was Seattle-bound. He’d lied. But then, back at CasaNegro Jude had reckoned that if the little rich girl really wanted off Luna that badly, it didn’t matter too much where she went. Besides which, the kid would probably do well at The Arc. From what Jude had heard, it was full of spoilt brats trying to simplify their lives.
“L/code... L/code...” The voice at the other end had been reduced to a petulant monotone. Fixx could have called on his ship’s digital intelligence for help with what was going to happen next, but the DI wasn’t talking to him. Not after Fixx’s five-minute rant to Ghost about how Europe had been corrupted by the greed of US-owned metaNationals.
Fixx hadn’t known the X3 had a USAF biocore, an old fly-by-light hand who’d practically begged to be DI’d by Boeing. That had been thirty years before, and from what he gathered the snotty little data intelligence hadn’t been that happy when the USAF sold the shuttle cheap to the French. Which was what happened if you decided to get digital without bothering to read the small print.
“Anyway,” Fixx told Ghost crossly, as the kitten floated past his face, “the fucking fuck’s probably too squeamish to help us anyway...” What came next was definitely illegal and bios were tied to some coded-in moral cut-off, or at least that was the theory.
“Input.”
Fingers flicked over the deck, pulling up blocks of code. Fixx could have used the floating focus on his wraparounds, but he liked the solidity of a screen, the way the blocks flashed into being, even though they only existed as pixels, ghost images of binary life.
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