Roseland watched in morbid fascination. Shuddered. Weird keepsake to have.
Steinfeld glanced at the calendar on his watch. “I only wish we knew how much RSV they have in storage. In the meantime, at least, they’re going to have to put a new scientific team together, to work out the vectoring.”
“It’s just a delay,” Roseland said lugubriously. “It’s coming.”
“Where’s Pasolini?” Torrence asked again.
The other two turned to look at him. And then looked around.
Where was she?
There were three women in Witcher’s little Colony apartment, and they were all beautiful, and all in various states of undress.
It was a little crowded, certainly, a little claustrophobic for his taste. He didn’t like being pushed in so close to them. Not this much. But then, if you have to be stuck in a small apartment with three people, Marion, Jeanne, and Aria were the sweetest kind of discomfort.
Administrative assistants, that’s what he’d called them when he’d filled out the forms to bring them to FirStep. They’d arrived a long, lonely week after he’d settled in here.
He felt so much safer now.
Speaking of filling out forms, Aria filled out hers marvelously, he thought, in that off-white negligee. It had been a good choice. Deliberately one size too small for her. She was oiling her Walther, the gun-cleaning kit open beside her. The strong smell of its solvents annoyed him in the close quarters, but it was important, today, that the gun be ready.
It had been, he reflected, more difficult getting permission to bring the girls in than it was smuggling the guns in. The colony people had strange priorities. Well, he supposed, perhaps it made sense. Guns don’t use up air or food or water.
Jeanne was in the shower. He considered going in, scrubbing her with the brush. No, she was moody this morning, best leave her alone.
And Marion. Sitting cross-legged in a corner, in her tight black neoprene skirt, neoprene bikini top with brutal uplift. Watching a minimono show on video. “Whatabuncha assholes, these minimono dwips,” she said. Clicking her black nails against the barrel of her 9mm H & K. But she didn’t turn the console off. “You know what I heard, I heard the minimonos wanta come here, think the Colony’s their intended homeland. Like the Rastas were with Ethiopia. They think they’re destined to live on the Space Colony, like, but they can’t get permission to come here because this Claire bitch, like, thinks they’re half crazy or something. Whud she say… ‘psychologically inappropriate.’ Fuck, that ain’t half. I mean, Gridfriend, gimme a break, they’re fucking out of their weaselly little minds.” Marion pretending to play a guitar solo on her submachine gun; like the gun was an air guitar. “Pisses me off,” she said, “they won’t let me smoke here. Couldn’t I sneak one, Dad?”
Witcher said, “Uh-uh. They have smoke detectors.”
“But we’re locked in here anyway. Under siege, like.”
“I was referring to even the possibility of your smoking it in the hall. You know I don’t tolerate smoking in the house with me.”
“In the bathroom? Please, Dad? When Jeanne gets out?”
“No. Take another pill if you need nicotine. Get a patch.”
“Not satisfying that way.”
She was pouting now. He liked seeing her pout. It was sexy.
He imagined taking her, then. Her and her pout. Actually, really fucking her. He almost got a hard-on thinking about it. The excitement was like a vibrating piano wire in him.
“I’m thinking about this plan, this locking ourselves in here,” Aria said. “I don’t like it. I want to go to the pool, and go jogging.”
“It’s just for a few hours, till things cool off,” Witcher told her. “They want to arrest me. It’s that simple. In a few hours things will be different. It will be a fait accompli, and they’ll see the error of their ways, and we’ll negotiate with them.”
“There’s just the three of us, against all their people. And that Claire woman doesn’t approve of us. How you keep us. She was here, she saw us. She acted very superior. I don’t know if she’s going to negotiate much.”
“Oh, she will.”
He wondered if he should tell them about the strategy. The purging. No. Unknowable, how they might react. They would have relatives on Earth.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Jeanne came out of the bathroom, nude except for the towel on her hair, bringing a scent of soap and scrubbed skin with her.
Witcher added, “Why don’t you go take a shower, Aria? You’ll feel better.”
She sighed. On the Colony, he made them all shower two or three times a day. Not so he could watch, but because he liked them clean in this crowding. Completely clean. She went to the bathroom, muttering in Scandinavian.
“And douche while you’re in there!” he called after her.
Thinking that he might have them play with one another, while he was waiting to see if the Colony would break down his door.
Watson felt a little better, seeing his new suite of rooms. It wasn’t a proper suite at the moment, of course, since most of the furniture had been moved against the walls to allow for the cardboard boxes the movers had left in the middle of the sitting room. They hadn’t even bothered to put the boxes marked “bedroom” in the bedroom, blast them. Frog bastards.
But God, what a beautiful room. He had developed a taste for ornate French decor lately. This one was 1890s, Belle Époque he supposed, ornate almost to a fault and yet lovingly composed, lovingly preserved. Perhaps he ought to purchase some paintings for that wall, though, it looked a little—
“Colonel Watson?”
Giessen. Always breaking in on him. “Yes?”
The natty little German was standing in the doorway. With him were two SA guards.
“It should be obvious, Giessen, that I’m quite busy. Is it important?” He was sorry he hadn’t yet made up the video-animated “message” from Crandall informing Giessen of his new posting. Shouldn’t have put it off till the evening. But he’d been eager to get into his more spacious flat.
“It is, ja, quite important,” Giessen said. Adding, “Herr Watson.” Knowing it irritated Watson. “We found the boy’s body in the river this morning. Bruises on his neck. From a man’s hand. Apparently he’d been strangled, although not quite successfully, before being dropped in the Seine.”
“Indeed.” Stuart! That bloody idiot. Supposed to make it took as if the boy fell in by accident. Another cock-up.
“So I decided to have another talk with the guard who was the last one to see the boy. A Sergeant Stuart. I became convinced Stuart was lying—so we had him extracted.”
“What! No one is to use an extractor without my authorization!”
“Or Rolff’s.” Giessen smiled.
Rolff! The bastard had betrayed him. Or possibly Giessen had intimidated him into it. The bloody fool should have realized that if Watson went down, Rolff, his co-conspirator, went down with him.
“And the extractor told us some very interesting things,” Giessen said, insufferably smug. A very faint smile on his liverish lips. “That you ordered the boy killed. That you asked Stuart to do it. And the boy tried to tell Stuart something, to talk him out of it. He didn’t get out much. Enough. Something about Crandall being dead. Video animation. That would explain why Crandall always seemed to take up your case when things were not going your way…”
Watson felt the warmth and comfort of the room recede from him, like an elevator failing down a shaft. “Disinformation,” he sputtered. “NR disinformation. Planted in Stuart, in the boy…”