LizAlec touched the steel plate, felt the strange hand grip her wrist and guessed what she was meant to do. Lifting the plate waist high, she stalled to position it clumsily over the open hatch. But Lars had other ideas, ones that didn’t involve LizAlec losing all her fingers.
Pulling the raised plate out of her hands, Lars threw it hard at the wall and saw the baby black half catch the hatch and hold it. He couldn’t have hacked lifting the plate by himself, his legs weren’t strong enough, but once it was up off the ground he could manage the rest.
A tiny gap still bled away atmosphere, but it was nothing to the swallowing emptiness of before. Pulling the girl over towards the wall, Lars tried to get her to help him slide the plate shut, but she jerked away from him and tripped, crashing to her knees.
“Jesus fuck.” Lars left her there — shuddering with cold and fear — and grabbed a folded square of paper from the ground, wrapped this round one shaking hand and pushed the steel square back into place himself.
Instant silence broken only by a siren somewhere in the background, its wail rising and falling like the howl of a distant ghost. In total, from when Lars and LizAlec simultaneously — but unknown to each other — began trying to removing the plate, to LizAlec finally sliding it back in place was maybe thirty-five seconds. Thirty-five seconds of oxygen and heat being bled away into a partial vacuum.
It wasn’t a Big Black, thirteen seconds of which killed you as surely as a bullet to the head, but it felt like one, at least it did to Lars. LizAlec didn’t seem to be feeling anything. She’d toppled sideways and was curled up in the dirt, choking, her mouth open like a dying fish as desperate gulps of air going down met vomit coming back up.
“Oh, fuck it.” Lars kicked her lightly in the diaphragm, which did the trick, bubbles of vomit spewing out on to the floor and then air rasping back down her suddenly cleared throat. He used the few seconds it took the girl to get her breath back to take a good look at her.
It was the first time Lars had seen a naked woman, at least a real live one. All the others had been holoporn projections or spread wide with some flashing pay-by-access Web address strung behind their blonde wigs like a dayglo banner. She was less contoured than he’d have expected a woman to be. Smaller breasts, narrower hips, less of her all round. Her nipples were neat, though, puckered and pulled erect by the chill.
It didn’t occur to Lars that the pneumatic porn-babes he lusted after were not just computer-enhanced, they were mostly just not real. Most were vActors, digital flesh pasted over three-dimensional, fully functional raytraced frames. Some were masterpieces of coding, but most were cut-and-paste clones of earlier idoru, updated for changes in taste. Small tails were big again, so were fine all-over pelts and pixie-like ears that folded in on themselves until they looked like vulvas. Furry was massive right now.
This one was way different, and Lars liked the difference. Her skin was smooth and mostly hairless, its shade pink and yellow mixed in with brown, and there were glints of deep red fire in her dark curls. Not that her hair was cropped close like most people’s, instead it just tumbled below the back of her neck. Casual and chaotic.
Lars had no idea a cut like that cost more than Planetside was offering for his arrest, but then neither did LizAlec. She’d just palm-printed the make-over against her mother’s account at Gattopardo.
Stepping over the still-gasping LizAlec, Lars took a quick look at the girl from behind. Her thin body didn’t go in much at the waist and her spine could be seen all the way down her back. Her legs were thin and muscled and she had tight buttocks that made Lars swallow hard just from looking. From behind she looked like Ben.
“What name?” Lars asked LizAlec, touching her lightly on the shoulder. LizAlec jumped and scrambled to her feet, arms outstretched in the darkness to keep him away.
“What name?” Lars demanded again, less patiently. Outside her door two men were now shouting at each other and somewhere down the corridor a siren was still going banshee. It would keep howling until the air pressure came up normal — that was what it was there for.
Beneath its distant electronic wail Lars could hear someone fumbling at a manual lock on the cell door, metal grating against metal as whoever it was tried to use a key. Which meant the power was down in this sector. Bad news for...
Ben.
“Shit... Fucking, fucking shit.” Lars punched himself crossly in the head. How could he forget Ben like that? Ben was still out there, stuck in his ice bucket, hanging from a single strand of monofilament on the wrong side of the metal plate. Lars could only think of two ways of getting him back and he didn’t like the idea of either of them. Although retracing his steps from Planetside was a tad more attractive than trying to prise off that metal plate and having another battle with the Baby Black.
“Fuck it,” Lars said loudly, “fuck it, fucking fuck it...”
“Who are you? What’s happening?” LizAlec’s voice was strung to breaking with fear. Lars’s accent might make him sound to LizAlec like he was talking English through a mouthful of sand, but she understood well enough that he was swearing. And even she could now hear Laughing Boy and Mickey wrestling with the door.
“It’s Ben,” said Lars.
“Ben? Who’s Ben? Did my mother send you?” She stumbled slightly over calling Lady Clare her mother but did it anyway: she couldn’t get used to thinking of the bitch as anything else, not even in her own head.
“Ben’s my friend,” said Lars. “But he’s dead, so I’m looking after him.”
That got LizAlec’s attention. “Dead?”
“I’ve got his head in an ice bucket,” Lars told her, his voice quiet but matter-of-fact as if he didn’t find the idea unusual, which he didn’t. The boy was already watching LizAlec’s heavy cell door, which had just clicked loudly as four deadlocks finally slid back. It was opening now, and Lars could see the barrel of a rifle poking nervously through the slit... Had that door been airtight, the girl would probably be dead, oxygen-starved, lungs ruptured open.
“Down,” Lars whispered, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. And when LizAlec stayed standing, Lars kicked her legs rapidly out from under her in one easy sweep and they fell together, Lars’s face pushed tight into the back of her neck. One of his arms went under her, the other snaked up over her face, finding her mouth.
“Quiet,” Lars hissed.
LizAlec bit down hard on his filthy glove and Lars punched her in the kidneys, feeling breath explode from her body. She tried to whimper but Lars had his hand too firmly over her mouth.
“Do you want to get dead?” Lars whispered.
LizAlec wasn’t sure if Lars meant killed by him or by Laughing Boy or Mickey, whichever one it was had just slowly opened the door. Lars didn’t know either. But she shut up and that was all that mattered. At least, it was all that mattered to him.
There was a quick click just outside the door, as if someone was trying and failing to turn on a light, but LizAlec’s cell stayed as dark as the corridor outside. The whole of the rifle barrel was in the room now, held waist high by a tall man wearing the cartoon face of a mouse. Mouse-face had frozen in the doorway, sweeping his gun in a hesitant arc above Lars’s and LizAlec’s heads.
The man was night-blind too, Lars realized. Maybe it was more common than he thought. Ben had been sightless in the dark, reduced to wearing a strange pair of CK NightRyders taken off a dead WeGuard. The CKs made everything glow red in the dark and go fuzzy at the edges. Lars hated them, they gave him a headache.
“Lady Elizabeth Alexandra?” Mickey’s voice was worried, as well he might be. Getting paid depended on nothing bad happening to the girl, Count Lazlo had been firm about that. When he said nothing, he meant nothing: not just crap that might leave permanent scars or bruises. Nothing. Losing her to a blow-out was not acceptable practice.