“You know what we’ve had in here in the last week or so, apart from you?”
Of course he didn’t.
“Two clones aboard a shielded cargo carrier and before that a fourth-generation Xan fighter that vanished off the screen almost before it came in range.” So Shiori could pilot her own plane... Fixx nodded. He should have wondered how she was getting to Planetside.
“Fifty-eight years without a single black landing and then I suddenly get three of the fuckers, including you...” LISA sounded almost aggrieved. “And you always were a shitload of trouble.”
“But you love me anyway,” said Fixx. LISA didn’t even bother to answer that one, which was probably just as well. “Look,” Fixx added hurriedly, “it stands to reason. Put up a blockade and someone’s bound to run it. That’s inevitable...”
“Yeah,” said LISA, “but when the Xan belongs to China’s most powerful industrialist and the two clones travel on cartes issued to the Napoleonic corps noblique. Then you’ve...”
“The clones had cartes?” Fixx exclaimed, then bit back his words when one of the girls turned to stare at him. Clones were illegal on Planetside, and as for cartes... People with cartes didn’t holiday at LunaWorld, not even as refugees. They flew out to Elysian in private shuttles.
“Cartes Nobliques? Fixx took care to speak softly, letting his throat mike pick up the startled question. He was shocked, really shocked, the kick-in-the-guts kind. That Lady Clare should mistrust him made sense — he sure as hell didn’t trust her — but that the bitch should sick clones on him...
But then maybe it wasn’t Lady Clare. Fixx drummed his nails on the edge of the cheap plastic deck and thought about it. “You know who sent the clones?” he asked finally. There was silence as LISA vanished, leaving a low hiss like wind in his ears and behind his eyes the pop and crackle of neural feedback. Fixx surfaced to take a quick peek at himself in a nearby screen and went back inside his head. It was less depressing.
The silence stretched out until Fixx thought LISA was gone entirely and then she was back. “They came in ready-cleared. Apparently I didn’t register the fact because I already knew.” She sounded irritated, even troubled, not that Fixx had time to notice. He was too busy fretting, unable to shake the feeling he’d been set up; that maybe he had never been meant to find LizAlec in the first place, that maybe he was the distraction, Lady Clare’s sleight of hand... Either that, or he was just some sad fuck on the wrong side of crystalMeth comedown.
“Was it Lady Clare?” Fixx demanded.
“I don’t know,” said LISA apologetically. “There’s no record of their landing, only echoes. Though given time I could collect the echoes, reconstruct the code sequences.”
“Then do it,” Fixx suggested crossly.
Inside his head, LISA shook hers. “Not even for you, gorgeous. It’s too dangerous.”
Fixx looked puzzled. Actually, he looked like shit. His eyes were as empty as some burnt-out tenement block, his cheekbones jutting out of grey skin, but he tried not to mind about that. “Dangerous?” Fixx asked finally, turning his head sideways as he tried to work out if he looked any better in profile. The tall musician had a nasty feeling the answer was probably a big fat no.
“Who do you think keeps Planetside’s Sabatier3 cells functioning?” LISA said, sounding resigned. “You think CO2 just combines with hydrogen by itself? That water just electrolyses for the hell of it?”
Fixx continued to look puzzled. He was getting good at that.
“We’re crowded out with refugees,” said LISA. “Or haven’t you noticed? The whole Planetside system’s going to implode if I don’t come up with something soon.”
“You?” Fixx asked.
“Me, gorgeous... Who do you think fills the tunnels with oxygen? Those Sabatier3s had a ninety-nine-year working life. You know how old they are?”
Fixx shook his head.
“186 years. Half the time I don’t know why I don’t just pack up and let you all die. Life would be so much more peaceful.” The AI was beginning to sound seriously pissed.
“You’d get bored,” said Fixx, with absolute certainty. “You’d get bored out of your skull. If you had one, that is.”
He was right, too. Urban myths of big AIs committing suicide did the rounds but Fixx was pretty sure they were only myths. He’d never come across an actual case and he’d bet LISA hadn’t either. BioAIs, now they were different, but then Fixx wasn’t too sure he’d have wanted to be condemned to eternity as the galactic equivalent of a fridge door either.
“You know what I think, gorgeous? I think you should ditch Shiori and get out of here. Take a hike. Go get LizAlec and if you won’t do that go back to Chrysler. I’ll square it. You know, take the locks off your door, wire you back into a feed... But get out of Planetside before the PSPD catch up with you, and ditch Shiori while you’re at it.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Fixx. But they both knew he wouldn’t. No way was Fixx going to walk away from a woman with a body like that.
“You know what you are?” LISA said sadly.
Fixx didn’t, but he knew she was going to tell him. She always did.
“You’re a dumb fuck,” said LISA and then she was gone.
And he was, too, such a dumb fuck he didn’t see the spike-haired boy in the black T-shirt and combat trousers who started following him the moment he left the bar. But Leon saw Fixx which was all that mattered. Well, it was to Leon. Help the tetsuo — but don’t get into trouble. Jude’s instructions had been clear. And for once Leon was trying to do what he was told.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
You must be out of your tiny mind
Fixx couldn’t be bothered to wait for Shiori to find him, so he found her instead, holed up in a polyfoamed pod she’d hired in the RunNowFun hotel. It was as much a Ripongi fuck joint as LunaWorld’s 49er was a real pioneer bar. For a start Fixx could almost stand up in the pod, which he never could have managed in a real love hotel.
But it did have a traditional grey Togo slab and a time-locked minibar stuffed with vacuum-packed wasabe crackers and tubes of iced Sapporo. It even featured torn strips of rustling paper taped round the air vent to sound like breeze-fingered leaves. Not to mention an assortment of foil-wrapped vibrators and an evil-looking surgical steel speculum in a pink fur-lined box.
There was a tiny toilet cubicle, too. But the clone occupied all of that, its black suit trousers rucked in a heap around its feet. Its ankles were strapped together with the missing belt from the trousers and its hands were fastened tightly behind its neck with a red silk tie. From the blood dripping from a split lower lip and the flowering bruises that covered the clone’s ribs, Shiori and the clone had been in mid-conversation. One that had been about to get much more serious if the short ceramic blade in Shiori’s hand meant anything.
The Japanese girl swung round from where she crouched in the lavatory door. Grey eyes raked over Fixx, giving less than nothing away. But the reptilian part of Fixx didn’t need to look into her eyes to know what was going on or how much Shiori was enjoying it. Mixed in with the stale air of the tiny pod and the sickly-sweet smell of the clone’s blood was something darker, muskier. It wasn’t so much conversation he’d interrupted, Fixx realized, as Shiori’s own private version of foreplay.