“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 zyteclass="underline" 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.