“No,” said a woman he’d never seen before, “that I can’t allow...” The new woman had a wide face and firm but smiling eyes. Her black hair was scraped back into little snakes and trapped under a nurse’s cap. “She must rest, I insist.”
Absent-mindedly, the nurse smoothed the front of her uniform, which was as white and as crisp as Anchee’s turned-back sheet. Everything about the scene was reassuringly normal. Much too normal, in the General’s opinion.
If that nurse was a vActor then her coding was better than anything the General had met before — and in his late teens he’d dealt with the best. The Chinese Army prided itself on its coding brigades, fit-triggering black ice, instant firewalls, self-setting trapdoors, he’d seen them all.
And he hadn’t walked away from the Army of the East empty-handed. Mencius retained military-strength crypt capabilities, not to mention grade one vActor-stripping software. But try as Mencius might, he couldn’t break down that picture.
Time and again, each new Samsung screen refreshed the opening image and Mencius set about stripping the scene back to basics. Except the basics weren’t there to be stripped back to. No skin peeled away, no flesh vanished, no crude polygonal-construct appeared in place of his daughter’s skull. The nurse, the walls, the fresh flowers, even the little oil painting of Bruges, they all checked out as real.
Which meant that if the touching little scene was computer-ghosted, then it was the best he’d seen. Scarily good. In his head the General tried to balance the screen shot of his daughter sleeping peacefully in her bed with the thinly disguised ransom demand from Brother Michael and the worrying, gut-churning fact that Brother Michael had Anchee’s bracelet on the desk beside him.
The General made no better a job of the problem than Mencius had done twelve hours earlier or than Mencius’s pet semiTuring had done twelve hours before that. The facts didn’t balance and that meant someone was lying. Which, as always, made the General want to reach for his gun.
General Que sighed. The greatest strategist of his century and he was unable to come up with a logical answer... Oh, he didn’t doubt something was badly wrong: he just couldn’t believe one of the most exclusive school franchises in existence could be implicated in trying to cover up the disappearance of one of its own pupils.
For a brief moment, he considered hiring mercenaries, launching his own raid on the St Lucius O’Neill, but the General dismissed the idea immediately. He was forty-three, for God’s sake, and an outright attack on somewhere his daughter probably wasn’t was the response of an angry child. What he needed to do was make contact with the parents of Anchee’s foreign friend. Find out if she was missing too, see if they’d had a message from Brother Michael.
As the General flicked off the little screen and tossed it into a rattan bin ready for burning, he wondered idly what was happening with his pet ballerina.
Chapter Twenty-Five
BarOut
Shiori’s plan was to hijack a Niponshi shuttle, hold the clone’s captured Colt to the captain’s head and command him to approach The Arc on its blind side.
It was Fixx who pointed out that spaceships don’t have a blind side, they have tri-D 360-degree vision. Not to mention electronic sensors that would put the most complex multi-lens fly’s eye to shame.
Fracture was way behind them and they were both back in Planetside, more or less. They were in a crowded tourist bar this time, halfway between Aldrin Square and the Edge, sandwiched in at the counter by a fat New Yorker and her even fatter husband on one side and two French boys on the other, neither of whom could keep their eyes off Shiori’s perfect breasts. Fixx knew how they felt. The Japanese woman might have the kind of legs that combined genetic luck with hard exercise and a gut that was not just flat but actually slightly concave, but it was her breasts...
Small, perfect...
Fixx shook his head.
“So what do you suggest?” Shiori demanded as she misread his gesture.
So far Fixx hadn’t been able to come up with an alternative. All the same, Shiori’s plan had zero subtlety and even less chance of success. And Fixx was shocked to discover he wasn’t ready to commit suicide, which was a revelation in itself.
Fixx tipped back his iced Stripe, buying time.
What did he think? Since meeting the clones, as little as possible, really. The gash on his temple was beginning to mend and Fixx had teased his blond hair out of the tiny dreadlocks so it flopped around his face. He didn’t like wearing his hair like that but it hid as many of the bruises as possible.
On first glance, Fixx looked good, even to himself. It was only when you got in close you could see lines round his eyes like cracks in glass. Fixx knew that was true, because he was watching his reflection in a mirror behind the bar. He used to like profiling, now it just made him feel old.
“Fuck it.” Fixx slammed his Stripe down on the counter harder than he intended, certainly harder than he should have done. The fat woman from Brooklyn squawked noisily with shock, and for the first time that morning both French boys looked hurriedly away. It didn’t help that he stank, Fixx knew that. And it didn’t help that he’d put the loudest possible track on the jukebox. One of his own, as it happened. Well, a remix of a remix of it.
“Is there a problem?”
The barman was pretend English, his accent sliding all over the place, but his face was impassive and his eyes hard.
“Yeah,” said Fixx, “I’m thirsty.” He pushed his empty can at the man and waited...
Hands on counter, the barman lent forward, bracing himself for confrontation. But he never got the chance to throw Fixx out of his bar.
“The problem,” Shiori said smoothly, “is that my husband’s just been mugged. By Sandrats...” It was neatly done, one delicate hand sliding out to move Fixx’s empty tube into neutral space on the bar in front of her. One arm sliding up round Fixx’s shoulders as if to comfort him.
Not drunk after all, but upset...
“Sandrats...?” one of the French boys asked, sounding suddenly very young.
Fixx nodded heavily, wincing at the pain that rolled through his head. His response wasn’t faked, either — real reaction, real pain. Sandrats wasn’t what the barman wanted to hear. And from the ugly twist to his mouth, Fixx realized it wasn’t something he wanted his customers to hear, either. Planetside had no street crime, that was one of its big selling points. It was cheap, tacky, out-of-date and beyond fashion, but you didn’t get mugged. That was what made it suitable for worried families, small children...
“You want to come in the back,” he suggested.
Fixx looked blank.
“Tidy up, maybe? I can get you a real doctor, on the bar...”
Jesus. The man was worried. No one used medics any more, except the very rich. It was well known that forty-three per cent of the educated Western world preferred to rely on MS MediSoft: the fail rate was lower.
Fixx said “No” just as Shiori said “Yes”.
“We don’t need a doctor,” said Shiori. “But somewhere to clean up would be good.” Her voice was soft, her accent liltingly Japanese. If Fixx hadn’t seen her slice open the first clone with one easy stroke, he’d have thought her a student, maybe a junior salariwoman. Only her slate-grey eyes gave her away.
The barman blinked, nodded and lifted the hatch on his bar, letting them through. Instinctively, his gaze flicked down the line of customers, checking their glasses were full, their plates weren’t empty, and then he turned to a steel door, allowing Fixx and Shiori to walk ahead of him into a small office. A bank of flat screens showed every part of the bar, including inside each toilet cubicle.