reMix

Chapter Fifteen Last Supper at the Hotel Sabatini

“Shiori?” Fixx demanded, picking a garlic-laden snail out of its shell with a Napoleon III snail fork, its two elongated prongs spearing into the mollusc’s rubbery flesh.

Just thinking about chewing the thing made his jaw ache. Mind you, that wasn’t surprising, given the purple bruise spread birthmark-like along one side of his face. Rubber hoses might not break major bones, but they ruptured flesh and split skin effortlessly. It was a pity that mending the damage wasn’t as easy.

Three large medipedes stapled together the gash over his right eye, Lady Clare having jammed the ‘pedes’ jaws either side of the cut, breaking off each body in turn to let the insect’s death-agony snap shut its jaws. Neat, efficient and cheap — all you could ask from combat surgery. She’d learnt the knack from the Auditor-General of the Church of Christ Geneticist, except he’d been only a simple priest back then.

It wasn’t pretension or love for French tradition that made Clare serve snails. It was necessity. If she hadn’t needed the medipedes for Fixx’s face she’d probably have tried cooking them too. There was nothing in the city to eat, except a dwindling flock of pigeons and the odd especially cunning cat; even the rats were mostly gone. Lady Clare had found the snails in her small kitchen garden. While Fixx had found a tabby kitten on his way through the darkened courtyard, he just refused to hand it over for the pot.

“Shiori?” Fixx repeated, chewing heavily.

“Her street name,” Lady Clare explained, cutting herself the thinnest sliver of Mahon. The Spanish cheese was tallow-like with age and oxide-green around the rind but Lady Clare didn’t mind: being anorexic didn’t seem so strange when everyone else was starving too.

“She’ll be waiting for me?” Fixx said, for about the fifth time.

Lady Clare sighed. “She arrives Planetside ten hours before you do. She’ll find you.”

“How do I recognize her?” Fixx demanded.

Clare looked at him in amazement. “You won’t need to,” she said heavily. “Chances are she’ll recognize you.” Lady Clare looked pointedly at his black arm. She didn’t bother to mention the little dreadlocks, his legs or the unusual silver sheen to his eyes.

Fixx tugged the top off a bottle of Tuborg, crushing the cap between metal fingers. He downed the stubby in one gulp and added it to the miniature Carnac growing in front of him; a few more bottles and he’d be able to start on Stonehenge. The snails weren’t great, Lady Clare was prepared to admit that, but she still didn’t think they needed that much beer to wash them down...

Shiori was pulled off Lady Clare’s Tosh database, filed under ferryman and cross-linked to Charon. Twenty-eight years old, twenty-four accredited kills, born on the thirty-second floor of a slum project. It was all numbers where Shiori was concerned. Even Lady Clare hadn’t been able to pin a single emotional outburst on her. But then, you didn’t get to work for General Que and top the field as a reflex-boosted ballerina if you had flaws.

Combat clones were all right, but they couldn’t really think. C/clones just responded to programming. And bioroids were fine if you thought the ability to consider two million options in a single moment and reject all but one was the key to a good street samurai — but Lady Clare didn’t think so. She’d rather go for a blade who intuited the correct response first time up without having to first discard the others.

Wiping greasy fingers on a cotton napkin, Lady Clare pushed back her chair and walked over to the fireplace. It was stacked with unlit wood and torn-out pages. The pages were ripped from a first edition of Tipler’s Physics of Immortality, the wood a child’s smashed-up oak desk she’d found in the attic.

The fire lit easily, first time. Lady Clare dropped her match into the rising flames and reached for an Italian jug of beaten silver. With its ivory handle and Sabatini crest, it should have been serving chilled wine in Umbria, but it was what she used to make coffee these days, not that she had much real Colombian left. About half a packet if her memory was correct.

Lady Clare tipped three spoons’ worth of precious coffee into the silver jug, added rain water and thrust it into the centre of the flames. The ivory handle had discoloured with heat the first time she tried making coffee this way, but Lady Clare was past caring. Ruined ivory handles didn’t feature high on her list of disasters. The entrance hall stank of wet rot. The vaulted cellars were already full of Seine water, rain was eating away the Hotel Sabatini’s foundations. Without even going up there, Lady Clare knew the floor of the attic was turning brown with damp. It wouldn’t be long before water crumbled the ceilings in the rooms below and the upper floors began to fall in. And once that happened...

“Coffee?” Lady Clare suggested and held the silver jug towards Fixx who shook his head, reaching instead for another Tuborg. Crumbs of Mahon had spilled down his shirt and stuck under his fingernails. He’d eaten most of the cheese and fed what was left of the mould-rich rind to his bloody kitten. So Lady Clare finished off the coffee herself, without milk. Her shaking fingers wrapped tight round the handle of a Sevres cup.

If it wasn’t for waiting on the kidnappers, she’d have been long gone, vanished into any one of a dozen pre-created ready-to-wear identities. At least, that was what Lady Clare told herself. But even as she thought it, Lady Clare knew it wasn’t really true.

As long as Paris was home to the Prince Imperial this was where she would stay.

Stupid.

She didn’t doubt it.

Deluded.

She didn’t doubt that either. But the old man wouldn’t leave, and nobody could make him; and besides, it was probably too late anyway. He’d be lynched if he tried to leave Paris and, even if he wasn’t, he’d never get past the army of the Reich camped around the city’s edge.

It was said that outside the périphérique Ishies and journalists outnumbered Reich officers two to one. Clare doubted it, but she didn’t know for sure. The Third Section’s central database was down, its RISC chips no longer parallel to anything, four terrabytes of hard sphere spun to a standstill for lack of power.

No, the old bastard would stay in the ruins of his capital. And all Lady Clare had to do was persuade him to surrender gracefully and LizAlec would be safe... but that wasn’t going to happen, part of Lady Clare had already accepted that fact. She wanted to be out doing something dynamic — rebuilding the army, ripping up cobbles to build barricades — instead she was sitting in a thunder storm, in the huge dining room of her own house on the Ile St-Louis drinking the last of her Colombian coffee, while the man she’d spent the last three weeks wanting to kill sat at the other end of an original Napoleon III table, getting drunk on looted lager. There was no logic to life and even less justice.

“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 him 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.