Inside the tiny room, white noise blared from every speaker, loud enough to blow out your eardrums. Voidoids3, LizAlec decided. Not that she could tell one Luna noise band from another. The area had started out as storage space and ended up as someone’s bolt-hole, at least that was how it looked to LizAlec.
The place was wall-to-wall mess, empty McDonald’s containers floating through the air, not even recycled or even netted down in a rubbish bag... But the bank of tek bolted to the steel floor was real enough. A Segasim, two Nintendos, a standard grey box and something square and black that had bits of crystal RAM sprouting from it like digital cancer. The walls were cluttered with cheap flickering flatscreens, epoxied or staple-gunned into place. Every single one of them was on. 197 channels and LizAlec didn’t know which one to watch.
“Here.” Leon lifted a silver flask to her lips. Warm sweet chocolate slid down her throat, so thick and synthetic it could have been melted plastic. LizAlec pulled a face, but then reached for the flask as warmth began to spread through her body, radiating out from her gut.
“You want that lifeboat?” Leon asked, clapping his hands to lower the volume. For a second, LizAlec looked blank and then realized the boy was talking about her pod. No, she didn’t want it. In fact, she hoped never to see the thing again.
“You mind if I have it?”
LizAlec shrugged. “Sure,” she said glibly, “it’s yours.”
The boy nodded and walked over to the nearest flatscreen. Running his fingers over its flickering surface he woke an icon called lasso and watched as a cartoon drone navigated slow circles around a cartoon dustbin, wrapping it in monofilament.
“Salvage,” the boy explained. “Space junk. You’d be ‘mazed how much there is out here.” Leon knew, it was his ship. Well, seventeen per cent of it was and the figure was rising. Jude had put up the guarantee, but then that was what mothers were for, and he’d never missed a payment. Didn’t intend to, either.
All that other shit was just stuff he’d told the other two. Fixx he could handle, provided Leon left his ma out of that equation, but the Japanese woman. Now that was someone he didn’t trust...
On a bigger screen the real drone had finished trussing LizAlec’s half-pod in a cocoon of monofilament, so the boy tapped a winch icon and the cargo doors opened to let the pod be pulled inside.
“Worth more than carrying people,” said Leon, without looking round. “Less grief too, especially that pair.” He jerked his thumb downwards towards where The Arc must be. “Should have seen the two of them. Bitched at each other the whole way out. Need locking up...”
Who needed locking up? LizAlec wondered, feeling puzzled. Mind you, she was getting expert at that. Maybe it was oxygen starvation, or perhaps she just didn’t know what the fuck was going on any more.
“Locking up,” said Leon, “and fed slop through a slit in the door. So they can blade each other to death or else fuck, whichever takes their fancy. Wouldn’t put my cache on the one with metal legs, though...”
“What?” LizAlec looked startled.
“Too old,” explained Leon, “too dopey. Came out to Strat looking for you and then fucked up, but Chink’s a real professional, I’ve seen people like her before.” He didn’t say it was on tri-D.
“Fixx?” LizAlec demanded, grabbing Leon by the arm. “Fixx is here?” She practically shook Leon off balance in her excitement.
“Tall guy, metal legs and arm, silver eyes...?”
The girl didn’t need the list, she already knew it was Fixx. Jeeeez. Well, she thought, better late than never. Fixx had actually got off his arse and launched a rescue mission. LizAlec was grinning like a lunatic, but she didn’t care. Swinging neatly on her heel, LizAlec let go of Leon’s arm and stamped for the door, ReeGravs ringing like bells on the metal floor.
“Where you going?” Leon demanded. He had his head cocked to one side and for once he was looking only at her face. Whatever Leon saw there, it interested him. Mind you, great tits, narrow hips and killer scowl, the whole girl interested him. You didn’t get too many of her type for your money in Fracture or Planetside. At least, not in the places he went anyway.
“I’m going to find Fixx,” said LizAlec as if it should be obvious.
“You and this guy...” For a second, Leon searched for a tactful way to ask but couldn’t think of one, and fell back on what he knew. Tact wasn’t in high demand in Strat or the salvage business. “You know, like, you guys fuck?”
LizAlec just looked at him.
“Just asking,” said Leon. “Because they had, you know? Didn’t much like each other but, well...” Leon spread his hands. “When has that ever stopped anybody?”
It wasn’t the bile, but her throat suddenly felt sour and her gut was so hollow it hurt, like he’d just sucker-punched her under the heart.
“Fixx wouldn’t,” said LizAlec. “I don’t believe you.” But they both knew she did.
After that, Leon concentrated on getting her pod safely stashed in the back of the cargo bay, making more adjustment to speed and angle than the job needed, until the ship’s semiAI was having to compensate for logistical problems that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
When he’d done all he could to organize the cargo capture, Leon began adjusting the speaker sequence, ripping Voidoid3 white noise from one side of his cabin to the other in a cascade. After a while, even that grew boring.
“There’s a spare balloon suit in that locker behind you,” Leon told LizAlec without looking up from his controls. The suit wasn’t her size and it was none too clean, but that was what Leon had. She was welcome to use his suit if she wanted.
LizAlec didn’t. She didn’t want anything to do with Leon, but she couldn’t stay as she was, dressed in an almost translucent second-skin that was ripped in all the wrong places. “You got a coat?” LizAlec demanded.
Leon shook his head. “T-shirt,” he offered. “In the sack in the corner.” He nodded towards a black bag, etched round with what looked like Togo stripes until LizAlec got close enough to see the holostrips were fake. The lock was uncoded, and the bag opened for her as soon as she knelt over it. A T-shirt in there, all right. What’s more it was clean, and obviously enough it was black.
She took it and she took a pair of black Diesels too, without bothering to ask. It wasn’t like she’d ever expected Fixx to be faithful. Actually, it wasn’t like she’d ever expected much of Fixx, period. But LizAlec still couldn’t help the tears welling up in her eyes.
“How do I get over to The Arc?” she asked Leon, pulling his Diesel jeans up round her narrow hips.
You don’t, thought Leon. Not unless you’ve got a death wish. The boy considered not answering, his fingers over the icon that locked the cargo doors, and then he turned to face her anyway. If he saw the hurt in her eyes, he didn’t let it show.
“You could wait until they get back,” he suggested. “I mean,” he checked the time tattoo on his wrist, “They said they’d be back, like, now.”
“What you mean,” said LizAlec, “is they’re already late.”
Leon nodded.
They’d gone in after her and now she was going in after them, that was fine, LizAlec didn’t have a problem with symmetry. “Can you get me close to the hatch?” LizAlec asked.
Did La Papa shit in the woods?
LizAlec felt the Shockwave Rider lurch slightly, engines humming. Whatever Leon was doing over at a screen, it was bringing the shuttle close into the ring. “I’ll erect a tunnel,” said Leon, “leave the outer lock already open, tie her to that thing’s skin.” He nodded his chin at an on-screen grab of The Arc. The boy could have been talking to himself and for all LizAlec knew, he was.