But now there were new flights every day. The Hyatts were full. Bars that hadn’t seen a non-package tourist in thirty years were busy hiring out beds to the highest bidder. Something big was going down: the only problem for Lars was that he didn’t know what. His bunker was too deep for him to be able to splice into a newsfeed, otherwise he’d have wired Ben up permanent, instead of having to find a socket every now and then, when the readout showed Ben’s battery pack was getting low.
He’d seen something interesting today, though. A scowling Earth kid grabbed from a shocked crowd, a WeGuard killed, guns firing. It was more excitement than Lars had seen in... he didn’t know how long. Since Ben died, probably.
Patting Ben’s ice bucket affectionately, Lars used its top to cut himself a huge slice of Jarlsburg. The Norwegian cheese was stale, but Lars didn’t mind. It tasted good enough to him. Besides, it was free. He’d lifted if off a cargo hand who’d scooped it from the luggage of some flax-haired Scandinavian refugee.
In a minute, he’d take a shit behind a pillar in a dead-end tunnel that ran off the downshaft, then he’d come back and wank to the soft glow of a holoporn slab he’d stolen years before. Lars knew each of the girls and all of their moves by heart, but it did for him. That done, he’d probably sleep. It wasn’t a perfect life but it would do.
All the same, he wished he had a newsfeed...
Chapter Three
Still Life (but only just...)
Passion was back — a new body and a new haircut — miked-up with a subvocal throat bead, standing in the middle of a pile of concrete rubble. It was forty years since she’d given up presenting a show for CySat and only eighteen months since she’d come back on air — syndicated to every major newsfeed.
She was in Tbilisi now, dressed in combat fatigues, the background carefully chosen to match her stark words. She spoke, as only Passion still could, straight to the vid, no script, no rehearsals, no retakes...
“Three hundred innocent Georgians, mostly women and small children, caught in the biggest skyscraper crash since the virus escaped.”
Red hair and the ends of her purple scarf flapping wildly in the January wind, Passion pointed behind her, to where the crushed and broken husk of a snow-covered tenement block stood chopped off like the stump of a rotten tree. Just in case the audience didn’t make an immediate connection, the camera lingered on the half-eaten carcass of a Russian tank, chewed down to its ceramic tracks and surrounded by the now familiar circle of dark grey ash.
It wasn’t ash, of course. It was what you got left with when a nanetic virus had finished chewing its way through weapons-grade steel. And the tank hadn’t been in front of the collapsed building when Passion arrived, any more than the rubble had been arranged in artistic heaps. The tank had been several hundred paces away, kitty-corner to the intersection where it had first started to rot. But Passion wasn’t interested in the small-code stuff, never had been, she was there to present the overall programme in a way it could be understood.
It had taken gold to get eight suspicious Georgian soldiers to lug the ceramic tracks to the exact position Passion wanted, and the grey residue was soot mixed with flour. Snow had covered the real ash hours before. But Passion wasn’t worried: it was a real tank, really eaten, in front of a ferroconcrete block that had really collapsed, killing real people. She’d just brought the elements together.
“Bayer-Rochelle, SkB, Imperial Impirical, all are rumoured to be working on a ‘dote. But what if that is not enough? What then? Who knows how much longer this plague will rage? Who knows if it can even be stopped?” Signing off with a long, serious gaze to the camera, Passion clicked her fingers and the tiny Aerospatiale 182 retracted its lens and flew into her hand, from there Passion downloaded the data to her belt, uploaded it to a local low-level ComSat and smiled. One of these days the virus was going to get into her camera, but until then...
Job done and done well. Twisting her head to ease the tension in her neck, Passion tucked the little camera into a canvas pouch on her belt and palmed a packet of Lucky Strike. Half a morning into the New Year and she’d already blown her resolution, just like always. Zero tar, low carcinogenic content, smart filter — and they still whacked up her health premiums. Still, that was CySat’s problem, and given what the network had to pay out on a hack who insisted on being on site in person, rather than sending in a drone and then doing a voice-over, the cigs probably made little difference.
Besides, Passion was a full director of CySat nV, not just the US franchise. She held a neoVenetian passport, with full diplomatic immunity, so she could afford to indulge herself.
Passion flicked open an antique Zippo, inscribed 101st Airborne — Summer of Love. It fired up first time. Passion prided herself on the small touches, and that brass lighter was one of her best. Of course, it needed fuel but Tbilisi had plenty of that, from wooden barrels of crude to bottles of petrol. And not a single functioning 4×4 anywhere in the country.
Which was why Passion had come down the mountains on a horse, balanced on the spavined back of an eighteen-year-old chestnut nag, which still cost CySat more than a new Seraphim four-track would have done had anyone still been bothering to grow them. Passion knew from neoVenetian intelligence — which took feeds from almost everyone else — that Honda and Ford were both busy trying to finalize code for an all-ceramic vehicle. The problem was, it could be months, maybe even longer, before the all-ceramics hit the market. And until they did, Eastern Europe, the North African littoral and most of Imperial Turkey had reverted to the era of the nag and carriage.
It wasn’t until you stopped to think how much of the world’s infrastructure relied on steel that the extent of the Azerbaijani catastrophe became obvious. That building behind her went down because it was polycrete thrown up around a standard ferric matrix. Let a nanetic virus reach part of a ferric frame and the building, any building, was eaten up from inside.
And the big problem — at least, Passion had been told it was the big problem — was that the building looked perfectly healthy until the ferroconcrete crumbled. Small wonder the police were failing to get Tbilisi’s project dwellers to move. Not that there was anywhere for them to go, except out into the ever-falling snow.
Sighing heavily, Passion ground the butt of her Lucky Strike under one boot heel and reached for a canvas bag. It contained goat’s cheese, rye bread and a flask of real coffee. High-grown Colombian, delivered by CySat’s diplomatic pouch, flown into Tbilisi just before the wind changed and the virus struck.
The woman chewed an edge off the hard bread while pouring herself half a mug of the hot thick liquid from an antique silver Alessi flask, inhaling the coffee’s rich earth tones over the distinctive sourdough smell of the rye bread. It was too hot to drink but Passion drank it anyway, following it with a second cup.
Nothing like it... Well, apart from raw sex, crystal meth and the thrill of discovering an unknown painting by Andy Warhol. And sad to admit, even Passion felt she was getting a bit too old for those these days. Too old for the harsh reality of combat reporting as well, if she was honest. All the same, Passion was glad she’d insisted on getting back in front of the camera, even if the little Aerospatiale was hers and CySat had only agreed to the trip because Passion was too senior, too stroppy and too famous to stop. Passion sighed again and began to dribble the dregs of her coffee into the snow at her feet.