“This is where it finishes,” Lady Clare told Count Lazlo, jerking her chin towards the paper.
The man nodded.
“And it finishes now,” said Lady Clare — and sank the curved blade up under his rib cage, punching it in through his diaphragm. Inside Lazlo, the blade slit open the purple surface of his liver, sliced through the pericardial sac and came to rest against his heart. Lady Clare could feel it beating.
Lazlo opened his mouth to scream and Lady Clare pushed hard on the hilt of the paperknife, forcing its point through muscle. Lazlo’s eyes widened with shock and then — much too late — blanked into rising fear. He was dead before the full horror ever hit him, leaving Lady Clare feeling cheated.
She struggled under Lazlo’s sinking weight like a woman fielding an unsavoury waltz partner and then the Prince Imperial stepped forward, reached under the arms of the corpse and lifted it away from Lady Clare. Together they laid Lazlo on the carpet.
Kneeling by the body, the Prince Imperial reached for the small handle and pulled the paperknife from Lazlo’s chest, wiping the blade on the dead Minister’s white cotton shirt before offering the tiny sabre, hilt first, to Lady Clare.
He smiled. “I really thought you were going to surrender.”
“So did I,” said Lady Clare, sounding empty.
She took another glass of cognac at the old man’s insistence, though she hardly touched it as she told the Prince Imperial about LizAlec, about the kidnapping, about Anchee and General Que.
The old man said nothing, just listened as she explained what the General wanted and what it would cost France. Which was more than they could afford but less than losing an empire. General Que got the contract to rebuild the whole of Paris, in exchange the Prince Imperial got enough gold to bribe the regular army into coming out against the Reich.
“But we have no food. How can the army...”
There would be a food drop within thirty-six hours, coming east over the Atlantic. An airlift involving Niponshi drones. Passion too was to be flown in especially to cover the conflict. The UN was to be informed that there was an antidote to the Azerbaijani virus but that its formula was known to the Prince Imperial alone. And that the Prince Imperial would be staying in Paris.
All the General wanted in return was to be given Gibraltar.
“Gibraltar?” The Prince Imperial sounded bemused, as well he might. Lady Clare started to explain and then decided not to bother. There would be time later to go into the General’s plans, which were either constructs of fiscal genius or the work of a madman, albeit a rich one.
“Are you prepared to sign an order to fight?”
“Is that what you advise?”
Lady Clare nodded.
The Prince Imperial reached for the Mont Blanc and tore the flyleaf from his own moth-eaten leather-bound copy of Cyrano. He was still writing the order when Lady Clare left the room, turning left into a marble-floored corridor. In a small armoury at the far end, amid walls covered with virus-eaten swords and halberds, the General sat reading by the light of a hurricane lamp. He’d found himself another atlas.
“We have a deal?”
“Yes,” said Lady Clare looking down at him. “We have a deal. All we have to do now is rid ourselves of Lazlo’s two goons guarding the main door.”
General Que picked up a buffalo-horn-handled, silver-bladed kukri once owned by the King of Nepal and weighed it in his hand. He was swinging it lightly from side to side as he made for the door.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
RingCycle
Swallows skimmed in low over the blue lake like combat aircraft, their tails spread in perfect vees as they slammed through hatching pupae, intercepting struggling mayfly before the insects had time to pull free from the surface tension of the water and begin their first precarious flight.
Fat bulrushes grew at the water’s edge, thin stems rising up to bulbous heads the texture and hue of rotting brown velvet. There was damp meadow grass underfoot and shimmering pink cranberry flowers that looked delicate when set against the tougher white of common daisies. Only the fact that the small lake curved up towards the horizon told Fixx that he stood within the ring.
The grass felt good beneath his feet, springy and pressing up hard. Somewhere around five-sixths G, Fixx reckoned, though it was hard to tell. After a couple of weeks off-planet it was only too easy to forget what real Earth gravity felt like.
Beneath him was rock and soil, about two metres’ worth. And buried under that were stunted tunnels filled with fat snakes of fibreoptix and long black powerlines. The metal floors of the tunnel had rung beneath their boots like a steel drum beaten with sticks. But looking at the lake, Fixx found it hard to believe he wasn’t back on Earth, in some rich untroubled place like Norway. Only, that horizon...
“Move it,” Shiori ordered, standing up from the water’s edge and flipping down the top on a bubble flask. Until a minute before her flask had been a flat strip of silver polymer, rolled tight and stuck to the belt of her chameleon suit. Now it bulged like the swim bladder of some fish, supplies for the trip ahead.
“Here,” she said, tossing Fixx the flask. “You carry it.”
Fixx fumbled his catch on purpose and watched the shimmering silver bladder bounce football-like across the grass. It didn’t burst or leak but then, organically woven polymer was designed to be tough.
To say Shiori had been getting on his nerves was a serious understatement. Of course, Fixx was an understated kind of guy in an overstated sort of way, but even he was getting close to saying something. All that stopped him was cowardice. Well, the hard cold expression on her face, which amounted to the same thing. That and the way Shiori kept stopping to read-off data from her Walkwear. As if the little grey box taped to her hip contained all of life’s answers.
Maybe it did, but somehow Fixx doubted it.
Their relationship would have been easier if Shiori had bothered to tell him what was going on. But the Japanese woman no longer seemed even to hear his questions, as if somewhere inside her head a switch had been thrown.
Fixx was beginning to wonder if Shiori was entirely human. She obviously wasn’t a straight off-the-peg clone, but there was something unnatural about the way she moved shadow-like across the rough grass, balanced on the balls of her feet, like a...
Fixx sighed. Like a fucking ballerina — where did he think that term came from?
Picking up Shiori’s flask, Fixx took a long look round him. It was daylight up ahead and daylight behind, but there had to be night at some point to let all this vegetation breathe out and he couldn’t see from where night might come. Unless some central AI just clicked off the overhead luminescent strip and shut down the whole Arc at one go...
He’d come into the ring maybe ten miles back, trailing after Shiori through an airlock. A long claustrophobic crawl on hands and knees through a service duct had led them to a dust-strewn polycrete bunker, where Shiori had casually slid in a wafer-thin knocker and blown the plastic door out of its frame, leaving Fixx half deaf with concussion. On the other side of the blown door was a narrow cave and beyond that daylight, or what passed for daylight on The Arc.
And now he was following Shiori’s flickering migraine-inducing camouflage suit around the fringes of a lake, skirting the lower slopes of a small mountain. Though up ahead some design program had dictated that the lake’s marshy edge should give way to small cliffs...
It was an illusion, but a clever one. Cut The Arc anywhere through its huge silver doughnut and you got a circle: the half-circle at the bottom was a valley, rising up to mountains on both sides, and the half-circle above was sky, painted electric blue... Except that the need to simulate gravity meant the landlocked bottom of the circle was actually the Arc’s outer edge. It was better not to think about it.