And now it had stopped moving altogether.
She was free-floating in space, trapped in a glorified coffin about the size of a MaBell vidbooth: not one of the head-only jobs, obviously, but a full-length one, like the box on the corner of André des Arts, the one with the imaginative holoporn stickers crawling all over the inside.
Hanging in space wasn’t the safest she’d ever been but then, blasting herself away from the slow-spinning silver grandeur of The Arc back towards Earth hadn’t exactly been a risk-free option, either. Even LizAlec could work the numbers on that. The pod was stabilizing now, no longer spinning. If LizAlec hadn’t known it was too unlikely, she’d have thought the escape pod was slowly, methodically putting itself into reverse, with much disgusted digital sucking of teeth.
In front of LizAlec, the Earth showed large and clear on her screen, cameras scanning through thick cloud to the ground below. Some primitive bioSoft kept imposing national boundaries as fluorescent red lines over the far, far distant landscape and edging up the coastlines in blue.
Somewhere on the unmarked panel in front of her would be a hot key to turn off the fluorescent overlay, but LizAlec couldn’t find it. Not that she’d tried too hard. Hitting strange keys at random in a stationary escape pod didn’t have much to recommend it. Not even to a girl who prided herself on living dangerously.
“Shit.” LizAlec tried to brush something off her face and found she couldn’t. Her hands had just thoughtfully been fastened to her side. It was a mediSoft spider, scrambling out of hiding to repair her face and making a neat job of it too, LizAlec realized, looking at the tiny arachnid reflected in her screen. Mind you, the pod’s medical software was as sophisticated as the AI was basic. Military-grade full-capability stuff. The rapid scan it had given her battered body in those first few seconds after the blast had been as thorough as anything she’d ever had done in Paris.
The spider clung to her cheek while infinitely articulated metal legs sewed shut a cut below her eye and pricked rapidly into the bruising on her cheek to suck away tiny droplets of blood. Blood from the surface had already undergone cell-salvage and been recycled straight back into her body.
This was just a tidy-up operation. The big stuff had been done right back at the beginning, when the girl had thought she was still going to die. Now she had an intravenous feed plugged direct into her wrist, feeding through a ceramic socket the mediSoft had punched into place before LizAlec even knew what the pod had in mind.
LizAlec suspected the glucose solution being dripped into her wrist contained high-level seratonin-uptake inhibitors. She certainly felt a hell of a lot more calm than she had any right to be. The pinpricks from a spider perched on her throat were small doses of erythropoietin blasted straight through her skin to boost her red cell count, but they were so minor and happened so infrequently, that LizAlec hardly noticed them.
The only bit of the deal LizAlec objected to was the colonics plug which the pod had inserted of its own accord. Now she had a strange gurgling in her stomach as liquid was trickled in and waste pumped out. LizAlec had a nasty feeling that the water flowing around her colon and the chilled tasteless water being offered every few minutes through a self-sealing straw weren’t entirely separate.
She’d seen programmes about closed-loop life-support systems. If she didn’t get to wherever the pod was attempting to take her real soon, the machine would probably shut her down to let mediSoft spiders insert thousands of tiny catheters through her skin to drain her faltering lymph system. LizAlec wasn’t sure how she was going to stop the pod doing that, if it suddenly decided that shutting LizAlec down was the girl’s most viable long-term option. Still, just being alive was pretty miraculous, which was fitting since she’d been standing in a cathedral when the Big Black came in.
LizAlec hadn’t intended to make a run for it, of course, not at the beginning. She certainly hadn’t intended to leave the freaky little sandrat behind either. But she’d been left with no other option. Not after Brother Michael had called her up to the vestry. The other girls had looked at her as she sat finishing her breakfast and muttered to themselves, though not one of them had tried to warn her. Not that she needed warning. She’d been able to work out what went on for herself. Sara’s downcast eyes and shuffling walk would have told her, even if Rachel hadn’t cried herself to sleep every night — or at least on those nights when she been called to Brother Michael’s vestry to pray.
LizAlec hadn’t been called up there to pray, though, whatever the others thought. LizAlec could replay that conversation in her head, word for fucking word, so perfect that her eidetic memory could have been verified in a court of law. But before all that she’d have to get there.
She’d reached the cathedral by taking the Otis, feeling sick as the lift blasted down from the women’s dorm, losing gravity as it approached the centre of the hub. And then it had swung itself out of the arm — feeling almost in free fall as it jumped the gap into the spindle — and turned through ninety degrees to rise rapidly towards Brother Michael’s yttrium-glass cathedral. There had been a hiss of air and then the door had slid back to reveal an aquarium-like gloom lit only by Earthlight below and the tallow brightness of the moon above.
Brother Michael was waiting for her, sitting in a huge steel chair below the altar. Steel pillars rose to a crystal ceiling and the whole dark sky was revealed above his head, so that from where she stood in the Otis doorway LizAlec could see all the way through to eternity. If eternity was what was really out there beyond the dust and the space junk. She left the crystalMeth-fuelled cosmic ramblings to Fixx.
“You wanted to see me?” LizAlec demanded, staring at the seated man. No way was she praying with him. She’d decided that before the lift even blasted off from her level.
The man didn’t answer. Instead, he just clicked his fingers twice and the lift door shut behind her, vanishing down the spindle with a low hiss.
LizAlec shrugged. If that was meant to impress her, she wasn’t impressed. She’d trained a fridge at school to open its ice-cream compartment automatically every time LizAlec picked up a teaspoon. And as for Anchee, she had a whole set of self-opening LV luggage. LizAlec waited in silence. Waiting in silence was something she was good at. In fact, she’d got silent waiting down to something of an art form.
But then the door of the Otis opened again behind her. Thumbs dug into the flesh of her inner arms, trapping a peripheral nerve, and LizAlec screamed, her hands flash-frozen as pain raced back along nerve paths to her brain. He hadn’t wanted to pray with her anyway. She’d been set up.
Some people got off on fear, LizAlec knew that. She knew also she wasn’t one of them. She didn’t get off on pain either, though there’d been a time she’d thought maybe Fixx did, until she realized what Fixx really got off on was cerebral self-flagellation, which wasn’t at all the same. But her relationship with pain and fear wasn’t quite normal, she knew that too. They clarified things, like hunger did. Pain especially heightened her senses, tightened her thoughts. Most of all, it crystallized her mind.
There was no effect Fixx could ascribe to his chemicals that LizAlec couldn’t pull up inside her head. The glass-edged clarity of meth. That sense of flash-vidding each moment so it imprinted forever on memory. She got that, and more...
Much to Fixx’s jealous disgust. He reckoned she came naturally wired. Either that or sometime before her birth Sabine Industries had strung in extra dopamine enhancers, uptake inhibitors and the rest of the whole insane pharmacopoeia. And maybe bundled in some heightened reflexes for luck. It wasn’t impossible.