The headlines scanned across all channels intermittently. Bras's face flashed up on each one, accompanied by nasal voiceovers similar to the servitor's praising King Ban's philanthropy in adopting the feral child into the royal family of Viva.
Bras in the royal family! A crazy stunt that'd send ratings, and pro-bank sentiment, rocketing. Why else would King Ban adopt a Tert feral?
When it wasn't Bras on the screen, it was me. I hated to admit it but Daac was right. If I'd kept my trademark hairstyle and skintight nylons, I'd be cooling my backside in a city quod by now. My stature was way too obvious—I might as well have been a flashing neon. At least with a lumpy head and a jellyfish dress on I could be mistaken for a Viva type.
"Free browsing time is fifteen minutes. Your time is now at thirteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds. You are required to insert your credit spike or please move along. Thank you for your patronage."
Thank you for your patronage!
If my face weren't splashed across every screen in the global city, I'd have tickled its plastic and titanium gullet with one of my charm explosives. I fingered them, tempted. But for a change common sense prevailed.
I froze an image of Bras and got my one complimentary copy, then I quit the newsstand before the servitor pissed me off further.
Outside, private 'pedes scampered up and down the streets. A few couples ambled with no real place to go. So different from the hysterical velocity of The Tert.
My nerves jangled again at the sensation of space, but in Viva it was the norm and skulking in corners was going to call attention to me.
I slowed my pace and tagged behind a group of four strollers, following them to some open parkland by the moat. They laughed and joked and threw titbits to the birds and 'gineered fish that clustered around on queue. The two men wore safari suits, one in black, one in navy and the women wore white jellyfish like me. Their suntans were so even and their skin so clear it was impossible to judge their age. Anywhere from twenty to sixty.
Living in Viva with all its nutrient-rich food and clean water definitely had its advantages, but it wasn't perfect. According to Common Net reports, the rate of natural conception in Vivacity had dwindled to an all-time low due to the inconvenience of the whole thing. King Ban was plowing resources into fertility pharma and PURBs—portable uterine replica birthers—as the mainstay of future beautiful, healthy citizens. One for every home!
Ironically, in The Tert there was a birth explosion. They just didn't live for very long.
Nature's little joke.
Seems only the weird and the poor wanted to bear and raise their own children.
I sat on one of the park chairs and tapped the nose of a porcelain gnome who gave me the tourist rap.
"M'Grey Island is a beautiful example of how Viva citizens have been able to sculpt their environment. A 'gineered island, it is part-time home to many of Australia's most prestigious citizens. Such is the closeness of this small community that the entire island is on closed-circuit security. Tours are conducted through M'Grey on a monthly basis and tickets can be obtained from the conveyance station.
"M'Grey's moat and canal water is fed from underground pipes flushing recycled saltwater. Fish especially suited to this environment are a feature of the waterways and fishing can be enjoyed all year round. It is not recommended you eat the fish.
"One of the features of M'Grey is the picturesque sailing bridge which every evening disconnects from its mooring to hover above the moat until morning, giving the residents complete privacy.
"Between March and June, the royal family are often in residence enjoying the casual atmosphere and water sports of their 'oliday-prep-la-cite."
The gnome pronounced the last few words with a cutesy flourish.
* * * *
I took the picture of Bras out of my kit bag and studied it awhile, keeping half an eye on the water lapping in front of me. Her face, though thin and angular, looked clean. And she had new arms. Real grafts or image-generated? I wondered.
The memory of her grateful expression, her willingness to share her last food bar, haunted me. How was she fitting into life in Viva?
A police water 'pede surfaced in the moat before me, splashed about like an oversized fish, then disappeared. A short time later it happened again. After an hour of moat-watching I knew I wasn't going to reach M'Grey that way.
Daac's words chased around in the back of my mind… Pat and Ibis can get you anywhere you want to go…
Had I been too hasty blowing him and his friends off?
Whatever gripe he had with Lang had nothing to do with me. What could it hurt if he tagged along to watch? If he could get me in there…
I reached inside the top of my caftan and fingered the comm spike he'd given me. Public comms were everywhere in Viva, all I had to do was call.
I got up and walked toward the closest one. I had the spike out before something stopped me. Something loud enough to be a voice in my head.
Don't trust him, Vanish. Don't trust anyone.
I put the spike away and hustled for a train. If I hung around M'Grey much longer a police 'pede would start running checks on me. I'd come back a little before curfew. In the meantime I needed to think in a place where I wasn't so obvious.
Time for another water.
* * * *
Half an hour before dark I was back near M'Grey. So were a crowd of tourists coming to gawk at the floating bridge. I drifted among them, stooping, tagging on to groups so that I wasn't obviously alone.
I maneuvered close to the bridge, listening while it counted down and explained its own detachment procedure.
The main section, it said, was powered by six sophisticated aero engines with variable thrust control, and a bunch of fancy noise suppression gizmos. With the bridge aloft all night and a no-fly zone overhead, it cut M'Grey off from the rest of the city every evening.
The whole exercise was automated, though police manned a supervision booth this end. Nothing robotic for M'Grey Island residents—they could afford humans.
As I pondered hiding on the bridge itself, the tourist blurb informed me that the movement sensors could detect anything larger than a cicada.
Feigning innocent interest I examined the outside of the booth for possibilities.
It didn't offer a lot. The area immediately around it on the mainland side was featureless, affording no cover. The side connected to the bridge was decorated with electrified razor wire disguised as graffiti art.
I could be fried or just shot down in the open!
Agitation turned to knots in my stomach. How was I going to get across?
I fantasized about disappearing again, never having to think about Jamon or Lang or Loyl-me-Daac or Razz Retribution. But life's curlier problems never vanish—they multiply.
When the whole show was nearly over, a small land-to-air 'pede crawled up to the booth and settled outside. I guessed it was waiting for the guards to come off duty. The booth itself looked like it was designed to survive any type of blast or attempt at forced entry, so when the bridge detached they probably just shut up shop and went home.
A glimmer of hope dawned.
I swapped my attention from the booth to the 'pede.
Maybe…
The last group I'd tagged on to were middle-aged out-of-towners. One of them—a blond, smooth-faced woman covered in expensive gold tattoos with her hair molded in a replica of her own face—talked incessantly, in jerky, affected Northern Hem about how much better everything was where she came from. The others paid little or no attention to her conversation.
I smiled at her and altered my voice. "Fascinating though, don't you think? And imagine, human guards. Not robbies."
"No way, honey," she tittered indignantly. " 'Bout as real as my late husband's gonads."
I stumbled over the image, but plunged on.
"You want a wager?"
Immediately her eyes lit up. "How do we prove it?"
"Touch," I said decisively. "It's the only way."<
br />
She looked doubtful.
"Five thousand global creds." I produced my fake ID and waved it under her nose.
Greed and excitement supplanted doubt on her face. "OK. How, then?" she whispered.
"Those guards are about to knock off duty after the bridge stabilizes. All we have to do is wait around long enough for them to leave. Then we'll politely grope them. Whadyasay?"
She glanced across at her friends, then back at me and nodded.
She raised her voice. "Gregor, dahl. Take the others back to the Hi-tel. Be along in a while."
"If so, Prim." Gregor brushed her with a bored look then happily complied.
As Gregor and friends wandered off, Prim and I moved closer to the 'pede.
The bridge had detached now and looked close to its desired altitude. It hummed in the air like a huge dragonfly with silver-wire wings. The last of the crowd clapped enthusiastically at the spectacle, while Prim and I fine-tuned our plan.
"Leave to me, dahl." She patted my hand reassuringly and winked. "Done this sort of thing before."
I stared at her curiously.
She caught my look. "Customs. Frisked more men than you could possibly imagine."
Customs! My heart went arhythmic.
"Don't we both need to check the wares?" I managed.
She held up ten fingers. "Customs officer's promise. No cheating."
The guards left the booth soon after, checking the locks behind them and nudging each other as Prim swept over to do her thing. Under the cover of her approach, I snapped two charms loose from my bracelet.
She engaged the guards in conversation and I did my best to blend into the scenery.
A minute or two of Prim tittering and the guards thought they'd got lucky. I flicked one of the charms at the booth.
The mini explosion sent all of them scrabbling for cover. The guards automatically flattened, facing the booth, pistols drawn. Prim crouched next to the 'pede with her hands covering her head.
I sprinted to her side and crushed the second charm—the mushroom—between my fingers.
"Prim, suck this!"
Holding my breath, I let off a hiss of gas right into her nostrils. She wobbled under the wave of an instant hallucination and tumbled backward.
With Prim riding high, and the guards practicing counterterrorism, I slipped around behind the 'pede and forced my way up underneath its skirt, hooking myself into the body structure. With my caftan tucked tight into my string, I waited.
I'd gambled a lot on my expectation that once the guards decided the booth was intact they would inspect the island for anything else suspicious. With a bit of luck they might even assume Prim dahl did it.
My instinct proved right. After a fruitless sweep of the area and a brusque body search of Prim they slammed her in the back of the 'pede and charged off across the water.
Provided I could hold on against the wind and the vibration, stand the fumes and dust, and was just damn crazy enough, I might still be alive when the 'pede set down.
Chapter Fourteen
Eight hours later I watched Eighteen Circe Crescent, M'Grey Island, from my post in between the concrete pylons of a private jetty. A sleek powerboat was moored next to me, its canopy crackling with the blue light of security.
After the 'pede—complete with a 'cuffed Prim who was having an intense conversation with no one about the price of hair molds—had unwittingly dropped me on one of its island berths, I'd spent the rest of the night smothering coughing attacks from the dust I'd swallowed by hiding in the 'pede's airflow system, and skulking between CC camera units searching for the right address.
I found the house just before dawn, when my fatigue was greatest and my less-than-terrific ability to plan totally dysfunctional. In fact I couldn't think much past walking right on in, dumping the files I needed onto the disk, and getting out.
In the back of my mind it occurred to me that getting in here had been too damn easy, but denial is an insidious monster, so I skulked on down the driveway.
No one was around.
I broke into a side entrance. Basic dead bolts and a motion detector. Not a tough job, but messy because I was tired and in a hurry. No alarms. No dogs. No tek.
Inside, huge wall-sized portraits hung in the corridors, each of the same person, a face so famous that I recognized it immediately.
But I still didn't add it up.
Nor did I twig to the covered furniture and stale air.
It wasn't till I powered up the PC in the upstairs study and a muscular bimbo crooned at me that it finally sunk in.
"Hi Razz, darling," himbo said. "I've totally missed you. Where would you like to go?"
My fingers seized above the keyboard.
This was Razz Retribution's frigging PC, in Razz Retribution's frigging house.
I was the idiot who must be under observation by the sum total of Viva's police and media. I scoured the ceiling and round the room for cameras and wondered when they'd stop rubbing their hands together and come out from behind their surveillance bugs to play. How often did a suspected perp turn up on the doorstep begging to be 'cuffed?
The coldest of furies gripped me. I was going to get out! And I was damn well getting what I came for!
Quickly I tagged my newly upgraded worm onto the operating system. The worm set about burrowing through the firewalls.
While I waited, I tried to focus on alternative escape routes. I sure as hell wouldn't be leaving the way I came.
But how then?
The worm breached the firewall and started squealing.
My fingers flew along the 'board trying to ride it up over the huge security wave that loomed behind the firewall. Secondary vast ice of the like I'd never seen. It rose and rose and rose, smashing the worm downward into a long, hard gully. It countered every command I could throw at it.
Sweat made my fingers slippery. I'd heard whispers of this sort of stuff…
King Wave. Diadem. It had names.
A few seconds later the worm was fish mulch and I was back with himbo. He wagged a pixelated finger. "Naughty, naughty! Razz likes her privacy. You're in trouble." He turned and flounced huffily to the background of the screen.
Himbo and Merry 3# would get on a treat!
He was back in a flash in a sprouky white dress uniform and hat, and began reading my rights. The general drift of it was that I was about to spend my life in prison for attempting to breach confidential files of a member of the media.
I blew him a bigger than average raspberry and tried the backdoor approach. There had to be a way in. There was always a way in.
My fingers galloped over the 'board again using the normal routes, the way Razz would do it. I got to her organizer, which pulsed with a huge lock.
I deftly built a key—the way Teece had taught me—and began to shape it to the lock.
I lost precious seconds while I calibrated.
From the windows of Razz's study I could see the 'copters drifting in like buzzards to a still-warm carcass and setting down on the expensive, rolled lawns.
The 'pedes would follow soon. One would be a restraint module with neural disrupters and other various fancy paralysis tek fitted to the upholstery for safe escort to jail.
They say if you got a life sentence in a Viva jail you lived to be well over a hundred and fifty. All of it spent alone, in serious mental agony—relieved occasionally by bouts of serious physical agony.
The lock sprung and I shoved Lang's disk in the sleeve. While I waited for the download, I assembled the rifle.
More seconds wasted.
Each 'copter was spilling out four cops. They fanned out. I should have been flattered—all that for little ol' me—but right now all I could see were odds. Too many of them.
Another noise dragged my attention back to the PC. Not the worm this time, but himbo, shaking his fist and screaming serious trash at me. He seemed faint; see-through almost…
The download icons on the screen flashed normal bu
t unintelligible data flow snaked through himbo, patterning his uniform. I instantly recognized the decoy. The files weren't transferring but… wiping.
Lang's given me a frigging wiper!
Diadem had been sedated and the hard drive was leaking information into the ether as quick as I could sweat.
I cold-slammed the disc from the sleeve.
Himbo got clearer again and blew a battle trumpet, but his walls were breached.
I ignored him and turned drawers inside out looking for something else to load onto. When I slotted a Zip disk, my hands shook with a rage beyond reckoning.
Precious more seconds passed, but I dumped everything I could scoop up onto it.
Then I shoved both disks inside my tank top and plucked my four remaining charms loose from the bracelet.
Two Wizards, a Trinity and an Angel.
I stepped across the room, keeping behind the cover of the slatted blinds. Two 'copters at south and east.
Two more at north and west and I had sixteen live bodies and all the points of the compass covered.
Two 'pedes slithered along from the nearest street intersection. If I didn't make a move before they got here it was going take a minor miracle for me to get away.
Who was I kidding? It was going to take that anyway.
I cut a large, rough hole in the security screen with my portable blowtorch and nosed the rifle through the bottom slat of the blind.
The security alarms went haywire.
I sighted on the south 'copter pilot as he leaned out of his machine. Unprofessional and stupid, I thought with grim satisfaction.
My shot was a perfect hit. Paralysis in thirty seconds. Then I swung around to the east but the pilot was safe behind his bulletproof bubble. I couldn't see him, let alone penetrate the casing.
I peeled the tab off the Trinity charm and one of the Wizards and kicked the slats wide open. The ground guys had about ten meters before they reached the house. I prayed that the ones at the back of the house were at about the same distance.
The Wizard took out the four from the east—unconscious but unlikely to be dead, unless they had weak hearts. The south guys had spread too far already and the Trinity only claimed two. I cursed having to use the other one on the same squad, but south was looking like my best chance.
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