Just how hearing objects worked Lars didn’t know, but it did. Pulling on the thin wire, Lars began to haul up Ben’s ice bucket. He didn’t want the monofilament snagging when he crawled over the lip into the branch tunnel up ahead. The bucket came up slowly, the length of monofilament telling Lars how far he’d already climbed. Only what Lars saw first was an orange flicker, like a glowbug rising up through the darkness.
“Shit, Ben,” said Lars, when he spotted the diode’s warning. “I’m sorry, man.” The bucket needed feeding. If Lars didn’t get it power real soon that diode was going to turn to red, and after that to black. It had never got to black before, ever — though it got to red once, when the whole of Planetside’s power grid went down and the authorities cut the ring feed on the Edge to concentrate on keeping the tourists warm and safe. And the diode had got to orange a couple of times before, too...
Lars sighed. Okay, more than a couple of times, but it wasn’t because he was careless, it was just... Splicing into a feed when you were an illegal took stealth, skill or brawn and sometimes Lars was just running too much on empty to make the trade.
“So what do I do now?” Lars asked. But enough of Ben wasn’t there to answer, so Lars answered himself.
“Go in after them, of course...” What other option was there? She had expensive clothes, which meant she was rich. She’d had her own bodyguard, even if he was a crap WeGuard. That meant she was richer still. All his life he had been waiting to meet someone like this, someone who could help him if he helped her.
Ben needed a new body for a start. And — postcards or not — Planetside had a contract out on Lars. Lars didn’t really understand that part of it, but Ben had been certain Lars couldn’t just go back to being good, even if Lars wanted to, which he didn’t.
“Got to ‘fess up and pay the man,” was the way Ben told it. Lars didn’t see how this was an incentive to be good. But he hadn’t told Ben that. Ben was the clever one, except he’d got dead and that hadn’t been too clever.
Clambering over the lip, Lars pulled Ben’s head up behind him and balanced the ice bucket on the nearest ledge. The new tunnel was narrow and lined with polycrete. Big signs said something in a language he didn’t understand. There were even strands of rotting fibre optic strung along its walls, unscavenged.
Lars could feel them up ahead. Three of them. Not that he’d have known the number if he hadn’t first felt them back in Planetside where there was air. But then they’d gone for the surface, out towards Fracture, after cracking the security code on a triple airlock. But they’d reached the airlock in a vehicle of sorts, a NASA buggy, and Lars had been able to sense three of them up to then. He’d been riding the chattering mail drone, only stopping his tracking to assure it that yes, he was interested and no, he wasn’t bored.
They were near the old US Base at Placid now. Rubble and cracked concrete was all that was left on the surface these days, but once upon a time that rubble had been the US Endeavour deep-space observatory until a Chinese combat shuttle flipped its circuits, ripping the concrete roof open like popping the top off a can of beer. Forty died, maybe fifty... Lars didn’t bother with the figures, it was back in his granddad’s time and Lars wasn’t big on history.
These days Placid was an official US war grave, off limits to anyone without a permit. Though the number of fat Midwestern combat freaks who were granted a permit was staggering. Usually they turned up in Planetside Arrivals kitted out with real paper maps and those grey military-grade Rom-Readers, dressed up in black jumpsuits with eagle flashes. All equipped to relive a war that lasted three days and started by accident.
“Shitheads”: Lars hated them worst of all. They hung around the Edge where they weren’t wanted, trying to bum lifts out to Placid and talking flashpoint tactics for a battle they’d never been at. And, worst of all, started fights they couldn’t finish when no one wanted to give them free rides.
But that wasn’t who this lot were. No, these were professionals, at least the two men were. Like muscle for hire but slicker and richer; better armed too. They were the kind who could afford to do six weeks on, six months off, so their muscles didn’t waste. Not Luna-born, but definitely lowGee trained.
The third person was the girl. The pretty one with the strange clothes. Lars wasn’t sure how a straight grab like that could be personal, but in the room up ahead the two men had been giving her too hard a time for it to be pure commerce. If the words “pure” and “commerce” weren’t too big a contradiction.
She swore — they hit her, so she swore again. That had been the pattern right the way down the first tunnel until they hit the airlock. Then she really went ape, until her screams were slapped into silence. Maybe she thought they’d been about to do a half-black on her.
It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened to a good-looking tourist, not that prospective customers got to see that in the brochures. You could cabbage anyone if you did it right, loss them out, pull them back. Working body, empty head — it made for cheap spares or cheaper sex if you weren’t fussy about emotional feedback. But that wasn’t what this was about: Lars had already agreed with himself on that.
No one pulled a rich kid out of a line at Planetside just to cabbage her as soon as they hit the Edge. She was being taken out to Placid for a reason. Lars just couldn’t work out what it was, but he would... Lars settled down in the tunnel, pushed his ear hard against a cold block of polycrete, squashing his balloon-suit helmet out of shape, and flicked channels in his head, looking for images.
He could wait.
Chapter Five
Internal Exile
“Fuck it.” LizAlec punched her fist against a wall and swore, more from anger than pain. Split knuckles hurt, but not that badly. So LizAlec punched the door instead, harder this time. Its slick metal surface didn’t even clang. She’d tried shouting, screaming, even kicking the door but it made no difference.
No one came. Not that LizAlec knew what she was going to do or say if they did. She’d tried, “What do you want?” But that worked no better than, “Can’t we work this through?” and “Do you know who I am?”
The door was antique, NASA-made, with some kind of manual handle that had no electronic override. It was also sheet steel laser-bonded onto a titanium frame. There was no need for it to be so strong and there never had been, but the first NASA ground station had been a belt-and-braces affair.
LizAlec bounced her knuckles one final time against its unyielding, cold, unrusting steel and began to cry. Tears trickled slowly down her thin face, smudging what little was left of her Dior mascara.
Laughing Boy and Mickey had stripped her, not just of the stupid, stinking balloon suit that blew up around her like some bulimic rubber doll every time she went through a vacuum, but of her skirt and blazer, even her black socks and buckle shoes. LizAlec wiped her wet nose with the back of a hand and, without thinking, wiped it dry on one bare hip.
God, she’d never thought she’d miss the St Lucius uniform.
But Laughing Boy had tossed her a paper gown, the kind hospitals used, then growled at her to strip. When LizAlec refused, he’d waved a shockblade under her nose and offered to do it himself. She’d almost tripped over her own feet in her hurry to get the navy skirt unbuttoned. Now she stood dressed in a cheap grey gown, small breasts brushing rough paper, her back and thin buttocks exposed to the biting cold. And all she felt, apart from fucking freezing, was contempt for her own cowardice.