reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  But she didn’t have a problem with that.

  “You flew in?”

  The general nodded. “Came in on the back of the storm. Sikorsky, full-stealth mode. Piloted it myself...” He was pleased with himself and tired enough to let it show.

  “Which means you can’t get out again,” said Lady Clare, sounding thoughtful.

  Both knew it was true. Once inside the viral spread you couldn’t get out again, not safely. There was a three-hour window once you hit the edge of viral airspace. Getting into trouble was never the problem, it was getting out again safely — same as it ever was. The man in front of Lady Clare didn’t look like a risk taker, not to her — more Tao Mo than Kau Tze — and Lady Clare prided herself on her ability to sum up a person’s character with one glance.

  Prejudice, LizAlec called it.

  The shrug he gave was almost embarrassed. “Getting in was very easy. How I get out depends on you. Actually...” the General shrugged again, “it’s interesting how things happen.”

  His voice was so quiet Lady Clare had to strain to hear him over the hammering of rain on glass and wooden window shutters. “You once met the auditor-general,” said the man. “Or so I believe?”

  “Volublilis?” Lady Clare nodded. “He was a friend, for a while.”

  “A close friend?” The Church of Christ Geneticist might be celibate, but there was no doubting what the General meant.

  “Not like that,” said Lady Clare firmly. “We played chess, nothing more.” Without intending to she glanced towards ivory figures laid out on a small table. Even buried under their patina of dust, the carved chess pieces were still obviously of museum quality. Almost everything in her study was.

  “A clever man,” said the General. It was meant as a statement, not a question, but Lady Clare nodded anyway. “And an excellent negotiator,” added the General. “You know the UN Pax Force almost stormed San Lorenzo?”

  She didn’t. Lady Clare looked so shocked the General almost laughed. “It seems some idiot at the UN decided the Geneticists had developed a ‘dote. Of course, they hadn’t.”

  The man didn’t say I had, but he thought it all the same. “They were going to fight their way into the complex...”

  “So Volublilis negotiated a third-party inspection,” Lady Clare said. “With someone neutral like the Mufti of M’Dina. Got the Mufti to sign a rock-solid confidentiality clause, with exceptionally punitive financial penalties for disclosure of any information not directly related to the Azerbaijani virus or its ‘dote. The Mufti indemnified the auditor-general, the UN indemnified the Mufti, everyone saved face.”

  It was the General’s turn to looked surprised.

  “He plays good chess,” said Lady Clare. “And besides, that’s exactly what I’d have done.”

  “I know,” said the General. “I’ve been reading up on you.” He dropped his hand back into the poacher-pocket of his trench coat and produced not the hardcopy print of her life that Lady Clare had been half expecting, but a small Kodak tri-D that he put face down on the desk.

  Poker, thought Lady Clare. The General was a natural poker player. He thought of it as a strength, but she’d never yet met a man whose strengths couldn’t be turned into a weakness. Lady Clare didn’t give General Que the satisfaction of reaching for the photograph since she guessed he wouldn’t let her look at the Kodak, at least not yet. Never weaken your own hand, went the old motto. Though its corollary was, it’s not necessary when there are always people around to do it for you.

  Instead, Lady Clare sat back at her desk and waited. Strange generals didn’t fly halfway round the planet because they wanted to deliver you biscuits. Somehow, somewhere she had something he wanted badly enough to compel him to leave home. And whatever it was, the General believed he had something to offer her in return. With food lining her gut and a litre of spring water now filtering through her overworked kidneys, she could afford to wait. Playing the long term had always been something she was good at, practised too.

  The General smiled, sat back in his own chair. His brown eyes, thin lips, even the set of his narrow jaw gave nothing away at all. But Lady Clare didn’t mind: just his being there gave her too much to think about as it was.

  What did France have that could interest a Shanghai industrialist? A few ruined cities, a countryside stripped of crops and what little livestock there’d been. The freeways rubble, the ferroconcrete bridges collapsed in on themselves. And by next week, even Paris might not be hers to sell.

  “My father ate his boots,” the General said suddenly. “In Tibet, in the middle of a winter that took one of his feet and all of his fingers. He shot men for eating their dead comrades, but he ate his own boots while he still had hands to hold them.”

  The man had been looking at her Dumas novels, Lady Clare realized, and had seen the one with its leather cover ripped off. He’d known it for a sign of what it was. In that study she had five oil paintings, including one by Louis David, and a hundred times over in the last week she’d have swapped the lot, even the small Rodin bronze in the corner, for a scrap of bread and a glass of clean water.

  She waited, watching him wait too. And then the General leant forward and took the tri-D from her desk. “It’s time we talked,” he said, turning the Kodak over so Lady Clare could finally see it.

  LizAlec. Dressed in a white cotton smock and with her hair cropped down to her skull. She was still scowling.

  “Two questions,” said the General. “Do you know this girl?”

  Lady Clare nodded. “What’s the other question?”

  The General shrugged, almost apologetically. “Do you want her back?”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Escape Velocity

  Shiori was coming in Moonside to The Arc, so she didn’t get a distant scan of the pod as it screamed Earthwards. And besides, she wasn’t looking for a pod, she was scanning for bodies and all she’d got so far was one, possibly male, very definitely dead.

  LizAlec’s pod, however, instantly identified the Shockwave Rider as a functioning cargo shuttle and recoded the pod’s escape trajectory, beginning immediate procedures to bring it back on itself, abandoning the statistically less safe Earth trajectory.

  The pod’s semiAI could have used full retro, but it wasn’t going to waste the fuel. Instead it gently began to slow the pod, chattering all the while to a sub-personality of the bioAI installed in the shuttle.

  Shiori had started to scan for bodies after she saw the shattered cathedral, which was long before Fixx finally managed to drag himself away from the shuttle’s battered Sony simbox. The cathedral looked like someone had cracked the top off a huge crystal egg and left the jagged shell sticking from a Gaudiesque eggcup.

  “Sweet fuck,” was all Shiori said. Then she began to punch keys on a walkWeax stuck to her belt, reading out its data from floating-focus fake Calvin wraprounds, Kwaloon-copies of last year’s model.

  No sign of life. Central spindle vacuum sucked.

  “Hey,” said a voice, “you didn’t tell me there was going to be no war.” It was inner-city rough, street-smart but not as tough as its owner wanted it to be. The combat kid would get there, though. Anyone who could hotcard a cargo shuttle and only admit after launch that he’d never actually piloted anything bigger than a landskimmer was going to make it, in Fixx’s view. If he didn’t end up dead first.

  And if he did end up on ice, Shiori was going to be the one to put him there. Leon and Shiori didn’t like each other. In fact, Shiori hadn’t liked Leon from the moment Fixx and she had stumbled out of the love hotel and found Leon waiting for them, slouched over the rails outside. And she was wasting a lot of Fixx’s time letting him know.

  Leon was keeping track of Fixx for Jude, only Fixx didn’t know that and nor did Leon, not really. Jude had sent Leon to stay with his uncle for a week and told the boy to keep an eye out for the tall musician and help him if at all possible. It was just Jude’s bad luck that the first thing Fixx asked the boy was if h
e knew where they could acquire a shuttle...

  The original idea had been that Leon would find them a shuttle and Fixx and Shiori would bribe the captain, using an HKS goldcard Fixx had LISA top up for him. That was until Leon discovered how much Fixx was intending to offer.

  “Jesus fuck, you could buy a shuttle for that,” the kid protested.

  “Fine,” said Fixx. “Then buy us one.”

  And that’s how it had happened. According to Leon he had an uncle who worked in the repair depot, who had a friend whose cousin... It was a primitive familial version of a firewall. Though the chances were there was no cousin. When it came down to it, the crate had probably been “borrowed” by Leon’s uncle, or the beer-gutted slob who passed for him. Not that the Shockwave Rider was going to be missed. The jerkhead who usually piloted it was sleeping off a drunk in the cells at PSPD — that was the story Leon stuck to, anyway.

  By the time Fixx had unhooked his violin from the shuttle’s simbox, the Shockwave Rider was hanging 200 metres off the edge of the shattered cathedral and Leon was running his own diagnostic, using the shuttle’s infrared scan. A closed flask of hot sweet chocolate was clutched in one hand, straw stuck firmly in his mouth. The silver flask was stamped US Marines, but Fixx knew a fake when he saw one.

  Leon had the data reading out on screen so Fixx could see it too. Except there was nothing to see. After the third abortive scan, Fixx accepted the inevitable: from the smashed-open cathedral at the top to the vast library at the bottom, the central spindle had been sucked dry. If anything had started out alive down there, it sure as hell wasn’t any longer.

  “Christ,” said Fixx, his voice raw. He was staring at the screen, looking in disbelief at the wreckage below. It looked like a blow-out, a bad one. What if LizAlec was...

  What if...

  Fixx shut his silver eyes and counted backwards from ten, so slowly that Shiori was already leaning over to check he was okay by the time he opened them again. She stepped quickly back, leaving him to stare blindly up at the screen. Whatever he was seeing wasn’t out there.

  “This girl means a lot to you...?” Leon made it obvious he thought the idea of Fixx and LizAlec completely absurd. And somewhere at the back of his head, a fragment of Fixx’s mind was beginning to agree.

  “I owe her,” said Fixx. Just what it was he owed her, Fixx wasn’t sure. She’d got him arrested as a terrorist, his studio smashed up, his legs ripped off. He’d been beaten, tortured, used by Lady Clare... But it wasn’t that simple. If it wasn’t for Fixx she wouldn’t have been in trouble with Lady Clare in the first place. Or maybe she would, but not over him: which meant she wouldn’t have been sent out to Planetside when St Lucius relocated...

  No, Fixx told himself, she’d be stuck in Paris, starving. Waiting for the Black Hundreds to take the city, after which she’d be face down in flood water, throat cut, every orifice raped to a bloody pulp. Fixx shook his head.

  “I want to take a look,” he said as calmly as he could.

  “At that?” Leon demanded, nodding abruptly at the blown-out cathedral. “I mean, you want me to set you down there...?” His whole body language said, We’re fucked if you do, but I’ll try it anyway. And he would too, Fixx thought approvingly. Leon handled the battered shuttle as only a skate kid could, throwing unnecessary loops and tight trajectories. Hitting the boosters and then slamming on the retros.

  “No,” said Shiori, without checking with Fixx. “The whole spindle’s dead. Take us out to the ring.” It was nothing personal, she was just busy focusing on data Fixx couldn’t see, the stuff scrolling past her eyes.

  Leon shrugged and threw a left to slide the shuttle down the length of the spindle, its surface whistling by beneath them. It was like skimming sideways along the crest of an impossibly long silver hill. Slipping down the spindle, Leon aimed towards a gap between two of the radial spars.

  “Sure you don’t want to check the bottom dome?” Leon asked Shiori. After her last order, he took it for granted that she was in charge and Fixx couldn’t be arsed to argue. He was too busy thinking about LizAlec.

  “No,” said Shiori. “Take us out to the ring.”

  Leon obediently flicked his fingers over a floating trackball and the Shockwave Rider suddenly slid away at a right angle to the central spindle, flipping over to skim low and tight along one of the radial spars that held the ring in place. At the last second, Leon flipped the shuttle up the approaching silver slope and down the other side, stopping dead as the outside edge of the ring flicked by below.

  “Take it down and find a hatch,” Shiori said without looking up. She seemed to be basing all her decisions on whatever data scrolled up her Calvin wraprounds. Fixx got a burning desire to ask Shiori what she was really after. She’d been shocked by the shattered dome but not panicked. If he thought his boss’s daughter was down there he’d have been shitting bricks. Hell, he still was...

  He’d had her original reason — LizAlec — and back at the love hotel he’d had her revised reason, Anchee. He just didn’t believe either of them. But he didn’t ask: if there was one thing Fixx was still good at, it was timing...

  “Hold her steady,” ordered Shiori as Leon matched the speed of the shuttle with the speed of the outside edge of the ring, until both seemed to come to a sudden halt. Whether they were above The Arc or The Arc was above them was impossible to say. But they now rested ten metres from the ring’s outer edge, keeping pace, holding tight to the ring’s revolution as steadily as any ramora clinging to its shark.

  Shiori clicked her fingers blindly across a tiny keyboard on her wrist, pulling up figures, sliding into the ray-traced heart of the space station below her. It wasn’t the missing girl the General’s AI had sent her after, it wasn’t even the Brotherhood’s infamous smear list of dirt on every politician who’d ever expressed doubt in Brother Michael and Sister Aaron’s God-given mission. Though no doubt the General would find a use for the list, should Shiori stumble across it.

  No, what she wanted was not the General’s daughter who Shiori now knew from the General was in bed, unconscious but unhurt, at St Lucius. And certainly not whatever the little tart was called that Fixx wanted found, not for herself anyway. What Shiori wanted, what the General needed finding, were his missing ancestors. And, from what Shiori had been told, they’d arrived on The Arc wrapped round the French girl’s wrist.

  And since Shiori hadn’t got a read-out on the missing shrine from the ice-cold spindle, they had got be somewhere out in the ring. Now all she had to do was get in there and find them. That, and persuade Fixx or Leon that they wanted to help her unscrew a vacuum-sealed service hatch in the skin of The Arc down below. Pick the wrong hatch and it would chop you in half as it blew out into space, to say nothing of decompressing the entire ring. Leon would know that instinctively and even Fixx might work it out eventually, if she gave him enough time.

  But Shiori wouldn’t pick the wrong hatch. Not now, not ever, that was why the General employed her. Shiori shrugged and reached for a balloon suit. Her gut might be blade-scarred, her heart as cold as her reflexes were augmented but she got results. Precisely because she didn’t care how she got them. Shanghai was full of ancestor-worshipping would-bes who lived in fear of the General. She didn’t give a shit about all that, any more than she cared who ruled in Beijing.

  As for her own immediate ancestors, Shiori hoped to hell they were out there howling somewhere in the void. Because you didn’t get to be like Shiori without having had some help, and Shiori had certainly had plenty.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  One over the Nine

  Two hours after LizAlec realized her pod was taking her back the way she’d come the over-priced silver coffin dumped her back at The Arc. Only, when she checked the screen, there was a cargo shuttle parked between the pod and Sister Aaron’s spinning silver promise of a new Eden.

  A shuttle wasn’t due for six weeks, she’d checked that herself. Fuck it, LizAlec was certain she had. There was no
way one was due... Which didn’t alter the fact that a battered black Harland & Wolff was tethered to the outer edge of the ring. Whoever was piloting the thing had just parked up and tied off, like they were leaving a horse at a hitching post. LizAlec knew all about equus. Girls from St Lucius/Paris rode every Saturday morning in the Bois de Boulogne. Or at least they did back when the Parisian franchise of St Lucius was still located in the Sixth Arrondissement and the Bois had not yet been chopped down for firewood or shelter. The horses, of course, had gone the way of cats and rats, straight down the throats of hungry Parisians, just a lot faster.

  Focusing in with her screen, LizAlec had to admit the shuttle hadn’t just been tied off. Someone had flash-welded a ring to the outer skin of the arc and clipped on a bounty cable made from spun monofilament.

  Wreckers maybe, or truckers... They were the only highrisers who used bounty cables, at least they were on tri-D. But no trucker would choose The Arc as a stop-off, wreckers neither, now LizAlec came to think about it.

  LizAlec sucked at her teeth. Like she needed to be back at The Arc when she’d been safely on her way to Earth. Though how she landed and avoided burn-up had both crossed her mind, so maybe the pod’s AI wasn’t as stupid as she thought.

  LizAlec searched the screen in front of her face, searching for some icon that might activate a transmitter. She was blindside to the cargo shuttle, so just maybe The Arc didn’t know she was there. But the cargo ship must do.