“Not bad, honey. Not bad at all...” The words were softer, amused, almost impressed. And for the first time in days, LizAlec smiled as she walked towards a polycrete prefab thrown up in the middle of a vast curving floor littered with smashed glass.
High above her, like corrupted raytracing, walkways and stairs floated in frozen darkness, held in place by strands of molywire so thin as to be invisible. All around those, like antique circuit boards slotted into transparent mountings, hung endless mirrors suspended in mid-air. The whole structure still swayed slightly with the after-effects of her passing. LizAlec had just completed the Brotherhood’s highest mystery, without ever intending to.
LizAlec opened the door of the prefab, fingers sticking briefly to the frozen handle, and then she found herself inside a simple windowless laboratory lit by halogen lights. It looked like something from St Lucius. Elements were stored down one wall, arranged according to the periodic table, radioactive materials clearly marked. On the opposite wall, racked in a cryo unit, were embryos and freeze-dried amino acids. There was a black Drexler Box in one corner and next to the matter compiler was a semi-AI fume cupboard. A greybox stuffed with parallel RISC processors sat on the floor, stripped back to its frame, lumps of oily bioClay stuck to it like cancer. Above it, a vast Tosh flatscreen was running endlessly through some fractal sequence.
At one end of a long plastic table sat a DNA polymerase reactor cum enzyme cutter, at the other an IBM nanite coder was on standby: between them was a molybdenum flask, a clay pot planted with valerian and a half-empty glass of water. Discarded by the plant was a simple silver bangle.
“Get the shrine,” said the voice in her head. “And then let’s get out of here.”
LizAlec did.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
20/20 Hindsight
Air compacting in front of it, the magLev bullet train sped over the top of Gibraltar Dam, breaking a flickering ribbon of holotape. Djellaba-clad adults cheered and beautiful, wide-eyed children released balloons, but they were added post-production, backed up in ranks on the screen behind Passion until even CySat/Maroc’s flamboyant on-site editor thought the effect was overdone.
Security was airtight, Sikorskys thudding low overhead, their gunpods outnumbered only by registered Aerospatiale drones fielding under-slung vidcams. The Ishies were pushed back behind an electric fence. The real public was hemmed in by a fence behind that. Even if the General had been willing to let the crowds get in close — and he wasn’t — it was an absolute condition that Lady Clare didn’t let the Prince Imperial appear in public without shutting down all risk.
The old man was in full dress as commander of the Grenadiers a Cheval de la Garde Impériale, gold braid rolling in cavalry loops across his blue jacket. At his side hung an antique sabre recently presented to him by the local Imam. The Bonapartes had managed to stay on good terms with the Islamic faith for over 300 years: the old man wasn’t about to blow it now.
He was mounted on a magnificent Arab stallion that had been shot up with enough ketamine to sedate the horse but not enough to ruin the proud way the animal held its head. And if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t have been able to tell that horse and rider stood rigid inside a complex lattice of laser, protection against all but the most determined sniper.
From where she stood, Lady Clare could watch sand flies vaporize as they met the circle, but no one else was close enough to see. And it wouldn’t show up on camera, laser lattices never did.
The old man hated the lattice, mostly because he refused to believe anyone might want to kill him. But Lady Clare had insisted, reeling off a list that began with the Antiguan Absolutists and ended with Zebediah Nouveau. Mind you, he didn’t hate standing inside that circle as much as he hated being there at all.
But Lady Clare had insisted on that as well. Keeping her good side to the main CySat camera, Lady Clare smiled. It was amazing how much clout you carried when you’d linked data credits to gold reserves to keep the senior officers loyal, welcomed the UN Pax Force with open arms, arranged for Paris to be the first European city overflown with the new ‘dote and put some backbone into the Prince Imperial. This was the General’s payback, and as far as Lady Clare was concerned it was a small price.
As for her reward... The new Princess Imperial looked around her, eyes stopping briefly as they touched on a tired young Imperial Guard. Despite the thermal cooling built into his ornate uniform he looked hot and hollow-eyed.
For the briefest moment, Lady Clare felt almost guilty and then she shrugged. Good sex was a new experience for her. The boy could catch up on his sleep when this charade was over. Feeling the Prince Imperial catch her eye, the elegant woman hastily looked forward, concentrating on the speeding bullet train as it shot into the distance on its first run from Tromsø to CapeCity.
She couldn’t afford a scandal, not yet. And after years of discreetly rewriting society’s moral code from behind the scenes, Clare was finding it tough to remember that CySat now had a vidcam permanently on her.
She’d have to get used to that. Have to do something about LizAlec and Leon too, but that can of worms could wait. Beside her stood the General, neat and spruce, brown eyes gleaming as he watched his train. But that wasn’t his real reward. They were standing on that: atop a vast ferroconcrete dam that now divided the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. The water level in the inland sea was already 200 metres lower than in the outer ocean, and it was falling daily as high summer approached and sea water evaporated.
Solar energy and wave power were fine in their place. And no doubt, affordable fission would be too when some metaNational finally cracked it. But until then the General controlled the greatest source of hydroelectric power in Europe. His daughter was back, seemingly unharmed by the fact her mind had taken a four-week holiday wrapped around somebody else’s wrist. His biotects were recreating Paris in perfect replica, coding each fallen building into an exact double grown from polycrete. Just shells at the moment, glass would come later.
As for the Fourth Reich, it was dust, from politics to history in twenty-four hours. After his elite team had taken out the high-ranking officers and key NCOs the Parisians had slaughtered the Black Hundreds, flooding to the battered, rubble-strewn outskirts of the city, driven by sudden patriotism and the thought of all that horsemeat. The Americans had done the rest, flying in UN battalions as soon as Langley confirmed that a ‘dote definitely existed and it was up for licence. But that came later, two days later, which was how long Langley took to process the General’s message that, actually, he and not the Prince Imperial knew the formula for the ‘dote. He didn’t, of course. Only old men inside the shrine knew the formula but he wasn’t going to tell Langley that.
Making the fight for Paris about horsemeat was Lady Clare’s idea, and like most of her ideas it was a good one. She was worth every bit of the twenty per cent holding in the Dam which the General had helped her hide behind shell companies. And that was before she became Princess Imperial. Now she’d want more... and he’d pay it, eventually. General Que smiled, teeth drawn back over yellowing fangs. It was going to be an interesting few years.