Reykjavik
Ming the Merciless ate cod sushi and pickled herring in a small bistro off Constitution Avenue. The bastard Rodriguez, the acting Transport Minister, had invited her for an informal discussion about the current 'situation' vis-d-vis the transit network.
'Situation' being politician-speak for embarrassing catastrophe. 'Informal' meaning secret, unofficial, deniable. Not too secret though, couldn't be in a venue like the bistro. It meant that the politician wanted to be seen talking to her, there's Rodriguez getting on top of the situation but discreetly.
Rodriguez, people's deputy for a safe seat in Sao Paulo, had a wide sallow face and just enough epicanthic fold to bring in the expatriate vote. He was dressed in this year's conservative kaftan, black worsted thrown over his left shoulder. Black because he was officially in mourning, with a white arm band to placate the sensibilities of the Japanese expats that made up a third of his constituency.
Two mutually exclusive colours for death. Part of the fragile global consensus that grew up after the war. Ming as ninth-generation Bradford Cantonese knew all about that. They used to have kiddie progs about it on English Two. Hi kids, ever notice how everyone is different? Hadn't been as many channels then, about fifteen or so, when the entertainment consoles were all matt black and Japanese.
'You're sure about this?'
'You saw the data,' said Ming but she doubted he had. People like Rodriguez had other people to look at data for them.
He shrugged. 'Data can be manufactured.'
'The source was pure.'
'My dear Ming,' said Rodriguez smoothly, 'there's always doubt about data, especially these days.'
'I was the source,' said Ming. 'Something, nature unknown, entered into the system via the Stunnel gateway.'
'And killed the President?'
'It was jumping the real space between two gateways. It may not have been aware that the people were there.' She could see that that really annoyed Rodriguez, the idea that the President wasn't important.
'You said this thing was an anomalous power surge.'
'That's what it looks like.'
'You keep talking about it as if it's alive.'
'It might be,' said Ming, enjoying Rodriguez's discomfort. 'Who knows?'
'So,' said Rodriguez, 'what are you going to do about it?'
'Nothing at the moment.'
'Why not?'
'I'm only the senior controller,' said Ming, 'I haven't got the authority.'
'You're the de facto Director-General. My department would give you full support.'
'I want more.'
'Such as?'
'I want to be appointed Director-General, I want a clearance upgrade as high as yours, I want full control of the contract KGB and I want access to military equipment.'
'Anything else?'
'Yeah,' said Ming. 'I want the pay rise backdated.'
The Stop
Zamina found that she wasn't scared of the Dixies at all, not now, after watching Benny stroll casually in and sass up their boss. After living in fear of the gangbangers' casual violence since she was small, seeing them up close was liberating.
Benny was talking serious biz to Billy Boy and the amazing thing was that Billy Boy was listening to her. Inside, the Dixie Reb clubhouse became just that, a series of rooms cluttered with entertainment decks, fast food and shiny things with sharp edges. What Roberta always called 'boy-things'. There were some girls around, mostly underage, wearing bobby sox and too much make-up. They hung around the edges watching Benny with stupid eyes. Zamina figured them for boy-things too, part of the clubhouse furniture.
'You want to hang casual but tough,' Benny had told them as they went in. 'Got to show no sign of weakness.' So Zamina and Roberta took their cues from Benny, easing themselves on to a niton sofabed and paying attention.
It was an education watching Benny work Billy Boy. The way she put it the scheme didn't sound political at all. More like a convoluted scam to grab more prestige for the Dixies. She was using his eyes as a guide, saying things to keep them on her face. When the eyes drifted Benny would hint that she had backing, connections, and the eyes would track back on line.
The words were like polymer chains, all woven together in an unbreakable cord.
Zamina glanced at Roberta. The comer of her mouth was turned up, a little half-smile that said she was enjoying herself Deep in Billy Boy's eyes hunger blossomed, hunger for me scheme. Even the bimbettes on the margins of the room were leaning in trying to catch the gist, child faces wide open and vulnerable. Zamina could see that Benny was chaining them up with her words.
Suddenly she was scared all over again.
Olympus Mons West
Sleep altered Old Sam's face. It softened out the rigid contours of his cheekbones and smoothed the violent lines that surrounded the eyes. His long dreadlocks were spread around his head, black at the tips, shading through grey to white towards the scalp.
'Is he dreaming?' asked Blondie.
Dogface shook his head and checked the illuminated LCD on the monitor. 'He doesn't dream.' The bio-monitor was battered Hitachi, its leads jacked into the old-fashioned plug behind Old Sam's ear. 'Something to do with the interface.'
Blondie looked at the matt grey oval on his own index finger. 'I still dream,' he said.
'Whole other technology that,' said Dogface. 'Oid Sam here, he's the old model, got himself an artificial nervous system when he signed on. Drove a lot of them crazy after the war, not dreaming. That and not having kids.'
'What was wrong with them?'
'Government had the patent on their genesets. They're functionally sterile so any kid would have to be spliced up in a lab. Government won't ever let it happen.'
'You can't patent a naturally occurring geneset,' said Blondie. 'I looked that up.'
'This boy ain't natural,' said Dogface. 'They did some stuff to the ubersoldaten. He's got maybe fifty per cent of the DNA he was born with, tops.'
Impulsively Blondie put his hand on Old Sam's arm. The skin was smooth and cool over hard muscle. There were little ridges of keloid scar tissue on his shoulder, radiating out from a central scar crater like a sunburst.
'Exit wound,' said Dogface.
'I thought the Martians used sound guns.'
Dogface grunted. 'The Greenies used anything they could get their hands on.'
It wasn't like that in the warvids. Even in the cheap exploitation pixs where you could sometimes see the join between the live action and computer-generated backgrounds. Blondie's generation had grown up on them, assimilating the soldier slang into everyday speech: Greenie, pop up, spider trap, fire mission, medevac.
'The bastard's nailed Paris.'
'Hey,' said Dogface. 'You gone off-line or what?'
'They always say that,' Blondie told him, 'And the wimpy one, you know the one that always gets scared on patrol, he goes berserk and does the mission and gets himself shot up and ...'
Dogface was staring at him.
'You,' he said slowly, 'have been watching too many vids.'
Lambada walked in from the crew room and stood at the foot of the bunk. 'You'd better wake this one up,' she said. 'Ming wants us up the Central Line doing integrity checks.'
'Is that where it went?' asked Blondie.
'Credit Card lost the trace just before Lowell Depot and we're getting some weird returns from the instrumentation on P-95.'
'What kind of weird?' asked Dogface. 'Weird weird or normal weird?'
'What can I say. Dogface?' said Lambada. 'Weird weird.'
'What about the real world?'
'Those fucks at KGB won't say much but they did confirm that a classified number of passengers got greased on the outbound Central Line platforms.'
'Did they say why the leftovers are blue?'
'Refraction index,' said Lambada. 'The stuff is made up of a saline solution saturated with some kind of crystals whose refraction index is blue - that's why the shit is blue.'
'What are the crystals made of?' asked Blondie.
'Mineral salts, calcium, traces of magnesium and potassium.'
'People,' said Dogface.
'And speaking of weird shit,' said Lambada, 'a real strange lady left a message for superman here.'
'White face, silver eyes?' asked Dogface.
'You know her?'
'What's the message?'
'I don't know. It's in his comms buffer and you didn't answer my question.'
Dogface looked back down at the Hitachi's display plate avoiding Lambada's eyes. Lambada folded her arms and glared at him. Blondie was shocked, it wasn't like Dogface to back down.
'I'm not sure,' he said, 'but it sounds like the Angel Francine.'
Lambada closed her eyes and went very still for a moment. 'Christ in a bucket,' she said. 'The fucking V Soc. Like we don't have enough troubles.'
'Whatever they want it's nothing to do with us.'
'Better hope so.'
Blondie waited until Lambada had gone before he asked, 'What's the vee sock?'
'Veterans Society,' Dogface told him as he initiated the wake-up sequence on the old Hitachi. 'You've got your triads, your Cosa Nostra and your yardies. And then you've got the V Soc. And if you get them on your ass, you truly have someone on your ass.'
Dogface picked up a hypo and slotted in a lOcc adrenaline cartridge. 'You watch a lot of vids don't you,' he said as he pressed the hypo against Old Sam's neck. 'Ever see Frankenstein?'
There was a long hiss as the drug went in.
Isle of Dogs
Emerging into sunlight for the first time in days, Ming went straight past the line of waiting autokarts and started to walk home. Westferry Road was a broad curve round the Isle of Dogs lined with genetically engineered plane trees. Real air blew up the curve of the river from the Thames estuary, a brine-smelling wind that shook the silver leaves. Many of the trees were over a hundred years old, planted to scrub the London air, locking up the cadmium, dioxin and lead in striated layers of cellulose.
A couple of protestors from the European Heritage Foundation stood between the joke palm trees in front of the old church. The EHF had leased the building as headquarters for their save the wharf appeal. A bright yellow canary with a crutch under one wing and a bandaged head stared winsomely out of a daylight hologram attached to the wall. Ming remembered the red-brick shopfront had once been an Orthodox church, before that a mosque, before that a synagogue and before that?
Waves of migrants rolling up old father Thames and depositing rich layers of ethnic silt on the shores of East London.
One of the protestors waved a sucker-box at Ming as she walked past. On a whim she slotted in her moneypen and gave them a hundred. What the hell, she could afford it. The portable credit unit was yellow with black stripes, a wax seal over the output jack was embossed with the seal of the Charities Commission. She guessed that most of the money would go on icebreaker programs to mess up the autodozers of the demolition firm.
The protestor thanked Ming in franglais and pushed a leaflet into her hand. She waited until she was round the comer in Harbinger Road before pushing it unread into the paper slot of the nearest bin.
Ming's Mansion, as it was known locally, was a lovingly restored maisonette set in its own grounds off Hesperus Crescent. A hundred and fifty-four years old, it had by a freak of planning avoided demolition. Ming had bought into the top floor when she started working for STS and over the years by dint of careful planning and some judicious intimidation, had managed to acquire the whole building. She used up a few favours getting it fixed - Kings Cross became the primary Northern European transit hub instead of the Gard du Nord and Ming got a preservation order on her home plus a grant for restoration, high-pressure water cannons blasting decades of grime off the concrete walkways.
Number One Husband Fu was tending a window box on the first floor balcony. Of the red painted doors behind him only two were real, one leading to the flat he shared with Number Two Wife, the other to his office.
Fu grinned when he saw Ming coming and ran down the external stairwell to meet her. The same bounding steps as he'd used on their wedding day forty years ago, he and his friends forcing the door to her parents' house in Bradford. Ming's girlfriends giggling as they tried to hold them back, but not too hard. The traditional cut and thrust of insult between the bridegroom's companions and bridesmaids. Ming, young, nervous and festooned with hothouse blooms, watching from the stairs as Fu's lanky body pushed through the doorway to claim her. That night she tangled with that body and crisp cotton sheets in the Hotel Metropole's bridal suite. They'd fallen out of the bed and the impact of her buttocks on the floor triggered her climax, the first in her life.
Forty years later, the maisonette filling up with children and aunts. Number Two Wife and grandchildren, Fu and Ming still liked to do it on the floor.
'Congratulations,' said Fu.
'Why thank you,' said Ming taking his arm. 'Where's Achmed?' Achmed was Ming's Number Two Husband.
'He got called out on a job,' said Fu.
They walked arm in arm towards the house.
'Today?'
Fu laughed. 'A structural failure at one of the projects. It could have waited but he was too German to leave it. The kids are at school and Aunty Shmoo took Bridgette shopping.'
'Do they know?'
'That's why they went shopping.'
'Ah,' said Ming as they pushed through the front door together. 'That leaves just you and me alone then.'
Bay Fifteen - Olympus Mons West
Blondie was still shaking as he followed Old Sam down the ramp to Bay Fifteen. The floater would have been easier to pull but Blondie preferred to keep it, and the bags piled on it, between him and the old veteran. The floater's handles were at knee height which kept Blondie stooped down as he pushed, the pain in his back helped him control the shaking.
Booms and clanks echoed up the ramp from the bay. Big engineering sounds as Fat Mama was lowered on to the friction field. There was a giant cough as the MHD turbine kicked over a few times and then accelerated. Over the noise Blondie could hear Credit Card and Lambada shouting at each other.
The servo motors started up again as Blondie emerged from the ramp, creaked like arthritic dinosaur bones as the cradle lifted back into the ceiling. The sounds ticked off the far walls and the ceramic finish of the old trains. Bay fifteen being where old trains went to die, lined up in dust-covered ranks down its thousand metre length. Blondie was grateful that the bad accident wreck was hidden out of view at the end.
As far as STS's accounts subsystem was concerned Fat Mama was also a dead train. A pre-war Chinese tank engine that had been cannibalized years ago, nothing more than a collection of barcoded spare parts, keeping old trains on the branch lines serviceable. The maintenance log knew different, as did the more stupid bits of storage records. Every fifty-two hours the system network would have a brief internal argument about the current status of Fat Mama but intelligent baffles put in by Credit Card kept the dispute from being flagged for management intervention.
Fat Mama was a twelve-metre engine built to pull cargo wagons in the period before friction fields and split-section tunnel integrators. Its field generator was powerful enough to shield ten wagons and then drag them through a gateway. The body shell was built around an MHD turbine that provided the power such an inefficient set-up required. Fat Mama had started off ugly and thirty years of Dogface's DIY hadn't improved its looks none.
Lambada leant out of a hatch near the water front end and gestured to Blondie to stop the floater where it was. Instrumentation light flushed her face red as she looked back into the cab and yelled something.
A chunk sound came from the mid section of Fat Mama and the loading doors swung open. Blondie noticed that they were at least five centimetres thick with two deep holes for the mechanical locking bolts. Dogface was standing in the doorway, he glanced at the bags piled on the floater.
'Where's the kitchen sink?' he
asked.
Old Sam picked up the first bag. It was made of linseed plastic and very heavy. Old Sam handled it easily, transferring it from the floater to Fat Mama's deck. Watching him started Blondie shaking all over again.
'I didn't know what we might need,' said Old Sam.
Veterans were strong even without the drugs, made that way for the Thousand-Day War. One thing to know that, another to have Old Sam lift you off your feet with one hand and threaten to rip off your face with the other. Answering the questions, because he couldn't think of a cool reply, because he was scared shitless, and because loss of face meant nothing when Old Sam was willing to turn that into a sick joke. 'What moneypen? I don't know nothing about that. Me and her, we just hit it off, never saw her before. Put me down for Chrissakes?'
There was the distinct sound of gunmetal as the last bag hit Fat Mama's deck.
'What's all that?' asked Lambada from inside. 'Tools of the trade,' said Old Sam.
The Stop
Benny stared at the words in the book as if willpower alone would decipher them. Picking a page at random she used Zamina's eyeliner pencil to mark symbol correspondence and pattern repetitions. Strictly speaking it was a code-breaking technique but Benny had used it before to identify patterns in alien scripts. A puterdeck could have processed the whole book instantly; even Roberta's woefully primitive home computer would have handled the task in minutes.
Brain is the best tool, she told herself.
Also, even in this century computers were linked to other computers, and use of them was unsafe and therefore forbidden.
Patterns were emerging in the text. Repeated sequences of symbols in groups of two and three. Assuming this was a human language these could be linking words or identifiers. A dull pain started behind her eyes, the concentration was giving her a headache. She managed to continue for another five minutes before the pain grew too severe. Reluctantly she put the book down and lay back on the bed.
Through the bedroom wall she could hear Roberta and Zamina talking in the kitchen. They'd be cooking up some food for the two Dixie Rebs stationed in the hallway. Benny was sure of Roberta's loyalty now but she was worried about Zamina. The girl wasn't hungry enough for what Benny had to offer, she had doubts and fears that could interfere with the programme.