That was, if you didn’t want some arsehole back in the studio to start doing a vocal cut-and-paste, and then before you knew it, you were up on screen with shit coming out of your mouth that you wouldn’t be seen dead saying. No, Passion used a digital copyright lock on all her vidcopy. Try to fuck it over and you wouldn’t see the pix for scattering digital dust. Sure, she had a cast-iron contract, but where the syndication department was concerned the motto was sell first, worry about illegal overdubs later. Passion should know: she was senior president of CySatNY.
If Ishies were the media hookers of life, then Passion was an expensive call girl, high class and gold card only, and that was the way it was going to stay...
“The heat is on...” Passion said seriously. She was standing on a black rock so hot that it reduced the soles of her desert boots to the texture of melted cheese. “But the stand-off continues. Inside the San Lorenzo complex, the auditor-general is still refusing to let naneticists of the UN Pax Force carry out their scheduled laboratory inspection, fuelling rumours that the Church Geneticist is hoarding a ‘dote to the dreaded Azerbaijani virus now destroying Western Europe...” Not to mention most of the Middle East, Passion added under her breath, but she knew her listeners weren’t interested in that.
“So tell me, Commander,” said Passion, turning to a squat man whose bulky heat-controlled NBC combat clothing made him look squatter still. “What do you say to the auditor-general’s claim that the Geneticists have only ever been interested in biotek?”
“Biotek, nanotek, what’s the difference? It’s all dangerous.” The man squinted at where he thought the spinning vidcam would be. “If they’re clean then let us in, show the UN they’ve got nothing to hide. Until then... Well, honey, you know my private opinion.”
The squat man put his arm round Passion’s shoulder and smiled grimly as Passion tried not to flinch. “I think they’re kooks. I don’t care if they’re Christian like us or not. Any raghead who lives underground in a desert and thinks he can bring Jesus back to life has got to be crazy. I think he’s got the ‘dote. Hell, personally I think the bastard probably invented the nanoVirus in the first place. He’s nuts enough.”
The General was working himself up for an attack, Passion realized. Covering his back on camera. Personally, she didn’t believe for a minute that the Geneticists invented the virus any more than that they were hoarding a nanetic antidote. And as for the auditor general, he was about as out-of-control as a teetotal Wall Street broker. If the man had a ‘dote, she’d have heard about it already — because the Geneticists would have been out there licensing it to every State desperate enough to sign on the dotted line.
And that meant all of them.
“Will Auditor-General Volublilis fight? Will he let the UN PaxForce down into the tunnels of the San Lorenzo complex? Or will he try to negotiate an altogether different deal? As yet, we don’t know. But as soon as we do, you’ll be the first to hear about it... This is Passion, outside the San Lorenzo Complex in Africa’s Megribian Desert, bringing you the world as it happens... Until next time.”
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 satellite — and smiled.
Chapter Thirty
Inside the Gold Mine
“How good of you to come...” The comment wasn’t ironic, the old man really meant it. Though Lady Clare didn’t see how he could. The Prince Imperial was waiting for Lady Clare in his study, six of his other advisers standing around the room. They’d been waiting on her arrival.
“I’m sorry...”
The old man waved her apologies aside. “Dry yourself,” he suggested.
A huge open fire burned in the grate, flames dancing against a carved fireback of Merovingian bees. What had once been a mahogany table burnt fiercely in the flames. What was left of the other legs was sawed into logs and stacked neatly against the wall. The old man didn’t need the fire, she knew that. He might have been born too late to be grown to one of FffC’s patented genetic templates, but he’d still undergone more viral rewirings than most exotics. Which was probably why he’d ended up banning both biotek and elective surgery against the advice of his own ministers. Nothing quite like a reformed junkie for banging on about the virtues of others staying clean.
All the same, Lady Clare was grateful for the warmth of the fire, for the normality of dancing flames; though she knew that, was exactly why the fire was there. For the same reason fresh coffee now sat in a jug on the table and fresh croissants spilled over from a Sevres plate... She knew her history as well as the Prince Imperial. When the Titanic sank a member of the Guggenheim family who’d been wearing an ordinary suit went to change into evening wear, so that he could meet death properly dressed.
Paris wasn’t sinking, it was being drowned. And though God might not be in his heaven and all might not be right with the world, the Prince Imperial would never be impolite enough to point out the fact, at least not in public. His empire was built on such elaborate negations of reality. Most empires were. Augustus Caesar ruled over a republic, at least on paper. The Prince governed an empire without an emperor, on paper and in fact.
The Emperor’s body would be in Switzerland, where it always was. To get into his crypt, sappers from the Fourth Reich would have to cut their way through slabs of titanium-reinforced concrete and then lance open a bombproof cocoon spun from alternate threads of boron mesh, graphite and tungsten alloy, laid at right angles to each other.
They wouldn’t bother. If they ever got past HKS Zurich’s automated defences, the Reich would just kill the juice to the Emperor’s pod. The old bastard wouldn’t know his body was dead, any more than he now knew it was alive. No thoughts could exist in that frozen neural wasteland of his. He’d been all but flatlining up in that satellite for years, the occasional flickers nothing but echoes and feedback...
She was crying without noticing it. Tears tumbled from Lady Clare’s blue eyes to trickle down her tired face. No one in this room had ever known the Emperor, not even the Prince Imperial. The Prince had been a zygote suspended in liquid nitrogen when his father had had a stroke. All his talked-about memories of his beloved male parent were based on relentless watching of old vids.
“My dear...” Sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair, his hands gripping lion’s paws carved from oak, the old man stared at her, waiting. They were all staring into the abyss and the abyss wasn’t so much staring back as reaching out to grip them by the throat. But the Prince at least was keeping his dignity.
Shibui. Notions of personal restraint. It was one thing to espouse the idea in public, which the Prince did particularly when visiting Edo, quite another to suddenly decide you were going to live and die by it. Personally Lady Clare blamed the old man’s long-dead tutor for drumming that crap into him. It wouldn’t be allowed to happen these days, not if her departments had anything to do with it. Her departments... Lady Clare began crying again.