reMix

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  She watched helplessly as modems whirred and diodes lit in syncopated dances across the console in front of her. LizAlec knew the two vessels were communicating frantically, she just didn’t know what they were saying, though it sounded like something Fixx might dream up, the dance of suicidal fireflies remixed with the sound of dolphins reading aloud.

  Only the main screen remained blank and none of the surrounding icons looked remotely like the international sign for vidmail, voicemail or synaptic link. In fact most of the screen was icon-less, just keys labelled in Hebrew, a script LizAlec had never seen before.

  “Shit.” LizAlec drummed her fingers on the pale yellow fascia of the console. The last thing she needed to do was hit the wrong key, but still she had to do something.

  She wanted out of there.

  The ceramic wrist implant was almost perfectly healed round its edges, the porous matrix of the implant’s lip melding seamlessly with her flesh. The spiders had done a neat job, it was just a pity she had to ruin it.

  LizAlec gripped the end of the tube feeding her wrist and yanked, pulling free the pastel blue tube. Warm liquid kept dripping across LizAlec’s fingers until she tied the tube into a half hitch. Reaching down between her legs, LizAlec found the catheter that drained her bladder and pulled, slowly. Removing it stung, but the pale pink tube came free. The designers obviously liked pastels, LizAlec decided. Some LokMart focus group must have told them pastel hues were soothing.

  That left... Well, Liz Alec didn’t like to think what that left...

  The restraining bodyweb was woven neoprene with velcro fastenings. As an original touch, the designers had made the belt a reassuring grey and coloured the velcro buckle bright red, probably so you couldn’t loose the fastening in an accident. LizAlec peeled back the velcro and instantly every alarm in the pod went off at once.

  The fucking belt had a smart buckle, which should have been obvious, though why the moronic AI should object to her loosing the gravity-web when it hadn’t minded her shedding the catheters, LizAlec didn’t know.

  She hurriedly refastened her buckle.

  “Listen,” she told the AI. “I want to get out, okay?”

  Nothing. Just the odd blip from a diode.

  She was going to have to do it the hard way. Of course, she’d seen Sophie Thorland crash her way out of a burning escape pod in Alien Empire III, but that had been on Fixx’s tatty tri-D recorder, the CD-ROM had been ancient and all LizAlec remembered was that Sophie got turned inside out by a vacuum long before she reached the rescue ship. (Having been turned inside out fifteen minutes earlier by the hero. It was one of those parts.)

  Okay, so check the door. If you could call the upper half of the pod a door. LizAlec checked it anyway, looking for an emergency release. Everything might be smart but doors still had to be fitted with a protected manual override. It was in the NASA standard.

  A recessed T-bar handle rested under a clear polymer cover to the right of her knee, its cover held in place around its edge by a row of tiny glueseals. Which took care of that one. Now all she needed was a bubble suit or an oxygen mask, any oX/m would do, but preferably the type you bit between your teeth.

  There wasn’t one.

  LizAlec even prised away the plastic moulding behind her head but there wasn’t a mask. At least not one that she could find. LizAlec was going to have to do it cold, literally.

  Gripping the polymer cover, LizAlec applied steady pressure and slid it to one side. She was so impressed with herself that she slid the cover back into place and did it all over again. Jerk at it, knock it with her knee, and the cover stayed where it was, push on it with a steady conscious push and the glue liquidized. Which was neat, but tough luck on anyone who was in there panicking, which she wasn’t — at least not yet.

  Time to go.

  Yanking up the red T-bar, LizAlec felt rather than saw the half-pod in front of her blast free to bounce into the cargo shuttle in front of it, then spin away like a maniacally tumbling surfboard. Retros on her half of the pod fired up, holding the pod to gyroscopic steadiness.

  Nine seconds and counting.

  In her right hand she held the emergency anchor and wrapped into her left she held its handle, her fingers pushed through its central slot to grip a dead-man’s handle, her thumb tucked in over the top. Still strapped into her chair, LizAlec hurled the anchor and saw it fasten to the skin of the shuttle, next to an airlock. Without thinking, LizAlec squeezed hard on the line-adjust and almost dislocated her shoulder as the handle automatically reeled in any slack and then some.

  Light line monofilament, with a b/s of five thousand Kg and impervious to cold down to absolute zero. Wind in any further and her shoulder would pop long before the line did. Keeping tight hold of the handle, LizAlec reached quickly down with her other hand and unbuckled her gravity web. This time the pod didn’t complain. One squeeze on the anchor handle and LizAlec catapulted out of the pod towards the Shockwave Rider, only just managing to bring up her feet as she slammed into its surface. Then she was there, crouched to one side of the airlock, ripping off the cover to its emergency handle.

  Thank God for NASA standards.

  A steel door swung in, crashing on its hinges, and LizAlec went scrabbling hand over hand into the small airlock, pulling herself along on the airlock’s luminous emergency rail. At the far end was a yellow handle that LizAlec slammed down as hard as she could. Behind her, the outer door began to shut slowly in a hiss of hydraulics. Faster. Faster. The girl would have been sobbing but her lungs were sucked dry, her arm muscles in spasm from toxin overload. Water vapour was being pulled up her throat in a steady hiss that flash-burnt her lips as it exited.

  She was over the line, LizAlec just knew she had to be. Black shadows raced in like clouds towards the edge of her vision, her cheeks were stretching, distorting. Her mouth was stiff, fingers cryo-cold, capillaries shrunk to invisible threads as her core temperature plummeted and Liz Alec’s body stole blood from her arms and legs. It was no good, she wasn’t going to...

  -=*=-

  “You ever thought of using the door?” The kid crouching in front of LizAlec wore a stained Voidoids3 T-shirt and baggy combats. A glass blade was taped ostentatiously to his ankle and he had a silver crucifix round his neck, a real one with the tortured man on. She recognized him from somewhere. And if she hadn’t been on her side vomiting her guts out, LizAlec might have remembered it was from the CasaNegro in Fracture. But instead she just noted she knew him, maybe.

  Up close and personal, the boy looked street-rough, with a Luna accent to break glass. And he was staring at her with an odd, half-ironic expression. Like he couldn’t believe what he’d just caught. As it was, LizAlec merely moved her head and spewed again onto the steel floor of the airlock, a string of yellow bile that burnt her throat before bubbling into little yellow marbles that hit the floor and floated gently away.

  “Here,” said the boy, climbing over her to wipe LizAlec’s frost-burned lips with his hand. He thrust an oxygen mask over her face, not asking whether or not she wanted it. She did. LizAlec pulled pure oxygen deep into her aching lungs. Inside her head, synapses relit and neuro-chemicals began to stabilize: it was like watching a city’s lights come on after a blackout. She was still sucking oxygen from the mask harder than a baby pulling at a teat when Leon jabbed an SB hypo against her neck and hit the trigger. Endorphins blasted into her bloodstream and then the boy slammed open the hypo and slid in another slug. Glucose and hypericum followed.

  “Like, you know... My uncle taught me,” the boy said by way of explanation. “That smart skin’s a real neat trick,” he added longingly, as he ran his finger down her arm. “Never seen a real one before, too expensive.”

  LizAlec shivered.

  That was when she realized she was more or less naked, the spider’s silk pulled in so tight against her body she could practically see the goose bumps on her inner thigh. And if she could see that, then LizAlec had a pretty good idea why the boy was sti
ll gawking at her.

  Pulling LizAlec to her feet, Leon grinned, holding her while both her ReeGravs found the deck and locked onto it. LizAlec was about to shake off his hand but then she changed her mind: she needed all the help she could get.

  “Through here,” Leon told her and together they limped into the hold of the Shockwave Rider, Leon closing the airlock’s inner door behind him. He took her across the small hold and stopped at a door marked Danger, Radiation, Keep Out, opening it with a smart card hung on the same chain as his silver crucifix.

  Inside the tiny room, white noise blared from every speaker, loud enough to blow out your eardrums. Voidoids3, LizAlec decided. Not that she could tell one Luna noise band from another. The area had started out as storage space and ended up as someone’s bolt-hole, at least that was how it looked to LizAlec.

  The place was wall-to-wall mess, empty McDonald’s containers floating through the air, not even recycled or even netted down in a rubbish bag... But the bank of tek bolted to the steel floor was real enough. A Segasim, two Nintendos, a standard grey box and something square and black that had bits of crystal RAM sprouting from it like digital cancer. The walls were cluttered with cheap flickering flatscreens, epoxied or staple-gunned into place. Every single one of them was on. 197 channels and LizAlec didn’t know which one to watch.

  “Here.” Leon lifted a silver flask to her lips. Warm sweet chocolate slid down her throat, so thick and synthetic it could have been melted plastic. LizAlec pulled a face, but then reached for the flask as warmth began to spread through her body, radiating out from her gut.

  “You want that lifeboat?” Leon asked, clapping his hands to lower the volume. For a second, LizAlec looked blank and then realized the boy was talking about her pod. No, she didn’t want it. In fact, she hoped never to see the thing again.

  “You mind if I have it?”

  LizAlec shrugged. “Sure,” she said glibly, “it’s yours.”

  The boy nodded and walked over to the nearest flatscreen. Running his fingers over its flickering surface he woke an icon called lasso and watched as a cartoon drone navigated slow circles around a cartoon dustbin, wrapping it in monofilament.

  “Salvage,” the boy explained. “Space junk. You’d be ‘mazed how much there is out here.” Leon knew, it was his ship. Well, seventeen per cent of it was and the figure was rising. Jude had put up the guarantee, but then that was what mothers were for, and he’d never missed a payment. Didn’t intend to, either.

  All that other shit was just stuff he’d told the other two. Fixx he could handle, provided Leon left his ma out of that equation, but the Japanese woman. Now that was someone he didn’t trust...

  On a bigger screen the real drone had finished trussing LizAlec’s half-pod in a cocoon of monofilament, so the boy tapped a winch icon and the cargo doors opened to let the pod be pulled inside.

  “Worth more than carrying people,” said Leon, without looking round. “Less grief too, especially that pair.” He jerked his thumb downwards towards where The Arc must be. “Should have seen the two of them. Bitched at each other the whole way out. Need locking up...”

  Who needed locking up? LizAlec wondered, feeling puzzled. Mind you, she was getting expert at that. Maybe it was oxygen starvation, or perhaps she just didn’t know what the fuck was going on any more.

  “Locking up,” said Leon, “and fed slop through a slit in the door. So they can blade each other to death or else fuck, whichever takes their fancy. Wouldn’t put my cache on the one with metal legs, though...”

  “What?” LizAlec looked startled.

  “Too old,” explained Leon, “too dopey. Came out to Strat looking for you and then fucked up, but Chink’s a real professional, I’ve seen people like her before.” He didn’t say it was on tri-D.

  “Fixx?” LizAlec demanded, grabbing Leon by the arm. “Fixx is here?” She practically shook Leon off balance in her excitement.

  “Tall guy, metal legs and arm, silver eyes...?”

  The girl didn’t need the list, she already knew it was Fixx. Jeeeez. Well, she thought, better late than never. Fixx had actually got off his arse and launched a rescue mission. LizAlec was grinning like a lunatic, but she didn’t care. Swinging neatly on her heel, LizAlec let go of Leon’s arm and stamped for the door, ReeGravs ringing like bells on the metal floor.

  “Where you going?” Leon demanded. He had his head cocked to one side and for once he was looking only at her face. Whatever Leon saw there, it interested him. Mind you, great tits, narrow hips and killer scowl, the whole girl interested him. You didn’t get too many of her type for your money in Fracture or Planetside. At least, not in the places he went anyway.

  “I’m going to find Fixx,” said LizAlec as if it should be obvious.

  “You and this guy...” For a second, Leon searched for a tactful way to ask but couldn’t think of one, and fell back on what he knew. Tact wasn’t in high demand in Strat or the salvage business. “You know, like, you guys fuck?”

  LizAlec just looked at him.

  “Just asking,” said Leon. “Because they had, you know? Didn’t much like each other but, well...” Leon spread his hands. “When has that ever stopped anybody?”

  It wasn’t the bile, but her throat suddenly felt sour and her gut was so hollow it hurt, like he’d just sucker-punched her under the heart.

  “Fixx wouldn’t,” said LizAlec. “I don’t believe you.” But they both knew she did.

  After that, Leon concentrated on getting her pod safely stashed in the back of the cargo bay, making more adjustment to speed and angle than the job needed, until the ship’s semiAI was having to compensate for logistical problems that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  When he’d done all he could to organize the cargo capture, Leon began adjusting the speaker sequence, ripping Voidoid3 white noise from one side of his cabin to the other in a cascade. After a while, even that grew boring.

  “There’s a spare balloon suit in that locker behind you,” Leon told LizAlec without looking up from his controls. The suit wasn’t her size and it was none too clean, but that was what Leon had. She was welcome to use his suit if she wanted.

  LizAlec didn’t. She didn’t want anything to do with Leon, but she couldn’t stay as she was, dressed in an almost translucent second-skin that was ripped in all the wrong places. “You got a coat?” LizAlec demanded.

  Leon shook his head. “T-shirt,” he offered. “In the sack in the corner.” He nodded towards a black bag, etched round with what looked like Togo stripes until LizAlec got close enough to see the holostrips were fake. The lock was uncoded, and the bag opened for her as soon as she knelt over it. A T-shirt in there, all right. What’s more it was clean, and obviously enough it was black.

  She took it and she took a pair of black Diesels too, without bothering to ask. It wasn’t like she’d ever expected Fixx to be faithful. Actually, it wasn’t like she’d ever expected much of Fixx, period. But LizAlec still couldn’t help the tears welling up in her eyes.

  “How do I get over to The Arc?” she asked Leon, pulling his Diesel jeans up round her narrow hips.

  You don’t, thought Leon. Not unless you’ve got a death wish. The boy considered not answering, his fingers over the icon that locked the cargo doors, and then he turned to face her anyway. If he saw the hurt in her eyes, he didn’t let it show.

  “You could wait until they get back,” he suggested. “I mean,” he checked the time tattoo on his wrist, “They said they’d be back, like, now.”

  “What you mean,” said LizAlec, “is they’re already late.”

  Leon nodded.

  They’d gone in after her and now she was going in after them, that was fine, LizAlec didn’t have a problem with symmetry. “Can you get me close to the hatch?” LizAlec asked.

  Did La Papa shit in the woods?

  LizAlec felt the Shockwave Rider lurch slightly, engines humming. Whatever Leon was doing over at a screen, it was bringing the shuttle c
lose into the ring. “I’ll erect a tunnel,” said Leon, “leave the outer lock already open, tie her to that thing’s skin.” He nodded his chin at an on-screen grab of The Arc. The boy could have been talking to himself and for all LizAlec knew, he was.

  “Yeah,” he said, turning to her. “I can get you in.” Leon grinned. “But you’d better know what you’re getting into. That bitch was armed and dancing — knife, molyblade, hotkeys, grenades... You don’t tool out with stuff like that if you don’t intend to use it.” Leon’s smile was getting wider by the second.

  “You know the first law of salvage?” Leon asked LizAlec.

  LizAlec shook her head: of course she didn’t. Thermodynamics, primogeniture, negative capability, yes... Even Salic law. But salvage?

  “The first ship on the scene claims the lot.”

  Looking at him, LizAlec could almost see Leon try to work out how much The Arc was worth as scrap.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Carthage Burns

  “Tell Lazlo I want a meeting...”

  Lady Clare was standing in her study, leaning against its vast carved overmantle, swaddled in a vast black coat that had once belonged to Prince Sabatini. She was still frozen to the bone and probably beyond. A black teak Buddha, two wooden doves from a gilded Thai temple carving and a copy of Twenty Years After now burned fitfully in the grate, flames dancing like unwilling ghosts then fading as smoke backed up in the sodden chimney.

  Her mahogany chess table and Prince Sabatini’s battered Jacobean stool had already been sacrificed that morning to the ash. Lady Clare would have used just the books, but they refused to burn properly, merely smouldering like badly dried slabs of peat.

  So instead she’d started breaking up the Hotel Sabatini’s priceless collection of wooden furniture. Later, if there was a later, history would hold their destruction against her, no doubt along with greater crimes. Not that it mattered now... Money had no value when there was nothing worthwhile to buy. And all Lady Clare really wanted was to stay warm, that and keep up her faltering courage. Because what came next would not be easy.