Instead, Lady Clare sat back at her desk and waited. Strange generals didn’t fly halfway round the planet because they wanted to deliver you biscuits. Somehow, somewhere she had something he wanted badly enough to compel him to leave home. And whatever it was, the General believed he had something to offer her in return. With food lining her gut and a litre of spring water now filtering through her overworked kidneys, she could afford to wait. Playing the long term had always been something she was good at, practised too.
The General smiled, sat back in his own chair. His brown eyes, thin lips, even the set of his narrow jaw gave nothing away at all. But Lady Clare didn’t mind: just his being there gave her too much to think about as it was.
What did France have that could interest a Shanghai industrialist? A few ruined cities, a countryside stripped of crops and what little livestock there’d been. The freeways rubble, the ferroconcrete bridges collapsed in on themselves. And by next week, even Paris might not be hers to sell.
“My father ate his boots,” the General said suddenly. “In Tibet, in the middle of a winter that took one of his feet and all of his fingers. He shot men for eating their dead comrades, but he ate his own boots while he still had hands to hold them.”
The man had been looking at her Dumas novels, Lady Clare realized, and had seen the one with its leather cover ripped off. He’d known it for a sign of what it was. In that study she had five oil paintings, including one by Louis David, and a hundred times over in the last week she’d have swapped the lot, even the small Rodin bronze in the corner, for a scrap of bread and a glass of clean water.
She waited, watching him wait too. And then the General leant forward and took the tri-D from her desk. “It’s time we talked,” he said, turning the Kodak over so Lady Clare could finally see it.
LizAlec. Dressed in a white cotton smock and with her hair cropped down to her skull. She was still scowling.
“Two questions,” said the General. “Do you know this girl?”
Lady Clare nodded. “What’s the other question?”
The General shrugged, almost apologetically. “Do you want her back?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Escape Velocity
Shiori was coming in Moonside to The Arc, so she didn’t get a distant scan of the pod as it screamed Earthwards. And besides, she wasn’t looking for a pod, she was scanning for bodies and all she’d got so far was one, possibly male, very definitely dead.
LizAlec’s pod, however, instantly identified the Shockwave Rider as a functioning cargo shuttle and recoded the pod’s escape trajectory, beginning immediate procedures to bring it back on itself, abandoning the statistically less safe Earth trajectory.
The pod’s semiAI could have used full retro, but it wasn’t going to waste the fuel. Instead it gently began to slow the pod, chattering all the while to a sub-personality of the bioAI installed in the shuttle.
Shiori had started to scan for bodies after she saw the shattered cathedral, which was long before Fixx finally managed to drag himself away from the shuttle’s battered Sony simbox. The cathedral looked like someone had cracked the top off a huge crystal egg and left the jagged shell sticking from a Gaudiesque eggcup.
“Sweet fuck,” was all Shiori said. Then she began to punch keys on a walkWeax stuck to her belt, reading out its data from floating-focus fake Calvin wraprounds, Kwaloon-copies of last year’s model.
No sign of life. Central spindle vacuum sucked.
“Hey,” said a voice, “you didn’t tell me there was going to be no war.” It was inner-city rough, street-smart but not as tough as its owner wanted it to be. The combat kid would get there, though. Anyone who could hotcard a cargo shuttle and only admit after launch that he’d never actually piloted anything bigger than a landskimmer was going to make it, in Fixx’s view. If he didn’t end up dead first.
And if he did end up on ice, Shiori was going to be the one to put him there. Leon and Shiori didn’t like each other. In fact, Shiori hadn’t liked Leon from the moment Fixx and she had stumbled out of the love hotel and found Leon waiting for them, slouched over the rails outside. And she was wasting a lot of Fixx’s time letting him know.
Leon was keeping track of Fixx for Jude, only Fixx didn’t know that and nor did Leon, not really. Jude had sent Leon to stay with his uncle for a week and told the boy to keep an eye out for the tall musician and help him if at all possible. It was just Jude’s bad luck that the first thing Fixx asked the boy was if he knew where they could acquire a shuttle...
The original idea had been that Leon would find them a shuttle and Fixx and Shiori would bribe the captain, using an HKS goldcard Fixx had LISA top up for him. That was until Leon discovered how much Fixx was intending to offer.
“Jesus fuck, you could buy a shuttle for that,” the kid protested.
“Fine,” said Fixx. “Then buy us one.”
And that’s how it had happened. According to Leon he had an uncle who worked in the repair depot, who had a friend whose cousin... It was a primitive familial version of a firewall. Though the chances were there was no cousin. When it came down to it, the crate had probably been “borrowed” by Leon’s uncle, or the beer-gutted slob who passed for him. Not that the Shockwave Rider was going to be missed. The jerkhead who usually piloted it was sleeping off a drunk in the cells at PSPD — that was the story Leon stuck to, anyway.
By the time Fixx had unhooked his violin from the shuttle’s simbox, the Shockwave Rider was hanging 200 metres off the edge of the shattered cathedral and Leon was running his own diagnostic, using the shuttle’s infrared scan. A closed flask of hot sweet chocolate was clutched in one hand, straw stuck firmly in his mouth. The silver flask was stamped US Marines, but Fixx knew a fake when he saw one.
Leon had the data reading out on screen so Fixx could see it too. Except there was nothing to see. After the third abortive scan, Fixx accepted the inevitable: from the smashed-open cathedral at the top to the vast library at the bottom, the central spindle had been sucked dry. If anything had started out alive down there, it sure as hell wasn’t any longer.
“Christ,” said Fixx, his voice raw. He was staring at the screen, looking in disbelief at the wreckage below. It looked like a blow-out, a bad one. What if LizAlec was...
What if...
Fixx shut his silver eyes and counted backwards from ten, so slowly that Shiori was already leaning over to check he was okay by the time he opened them again. She stepped quickly back, leaving him to stare blindly up at the screen. Whatever he was seeing wasn’t out there.
“This girl means a lot to you...?” Leon made it obvious he thought the idea of Fixx and LizAlec completely absurd. And somewhere at the back of his head, a fragment of Fixx’s mind was beginning to agree.
“I owe her,” said Fixx. Just what it was he owed her, Fixx wasn’t sure. She’d got him arrested as a terrorist, his studio smashed up, his legs ripped off. He’d been beaten, tortured, used by Lady Clare... But it wasn’t that simple. If it wasn’t for Fixx she wouldn’t have been in trouble with Lady Clare in the first place. Or maybe she would, but not over him: which meant she wouldn’t have been sent out to Planetside when St Lucius relocated...
No, Fixx told himself, she’d be stuck in Paris, starving. Waiting for the Black Hundreds to take the city, after which she’d be face down in flood water, throat cut, every orifice raped to a bloody pulp. Fixx shook his head.