Nylon Angel (16 page)

The island contained maybe two hundred canals surrounded by a lake big enough for afternoon pleasure cruises and seeded fishing. The lake was for residents only and deliberately serated retaining walls made it impossible to launch from the mainland perimeter. It gave the nervous rich the security they craved. Circe Crescent nestled in the centre of the island where the canals got narrow and personal and very exxy.

I jumped the train at an earlier stop and walked. Just in case someone was expecting me. So far I hadn’t seen much heat, apart from the ’pedes. That made me nervous.

Bras’s face had appeared twice more on
One-World
ads on the ride uptown. Once on a floating billboard, the other time on the giant screen on the front of the Viva Bank building. Right alongside King Ban himself. I figured that meant she was still alive, but the whys and wheres made my head ache. Maybe she didn’t need my help any more, but as soon as I got Lang’s info back to him I was going to find out.

I walked along distractedly, like I really knew my way but was thinking about something else. In the inner gyro most people used private ’pedes. If you were strolling on the street then you were probably on candid camera.

I sloped into a mobile newsstand, my head averted from the servitor’s receptors. The stand was an expensive one, sporting a hundred or more screens. But then M’Grey was a ritzy area.

‘Which news do you require?
One-World
?
Offworld
?
Common
?
Tabloid
?’ asked the servitor in a refined drawl. I wondered which famous newsreader they’d modelled it on.

‘Just browsing,’ I muttered, consciously changing the inflexions of my voice in case the stand was bugged.

The headlines scanned across all channels intermittently. Bras’s face flashed up on each one, accompanied by nasal voiceovers similar to the servitor’s praising King Ban’s philanthropy in adopting the feral child into the royal family of Viva.

Bras in the royal family! A crazy stunt that’d send ratings, and pro-bank sentiment, rocketing. Why else would King Ban adopt a Tert feral?

When it wasn’t Bras on the screen, it was me. I hated to admit it but Daac was right. If I’d kept my trademark hairstyle and skin-tight nylons, I’d be cooling my backside in a city quod by now. My stature was
way
too obvious - I might as well have been a flashing neon. At least with a lumpy head and a jellyfish dress on I could be mistaken for a Viva type.

‘Free browsing time is fifteen minutes. Your time is now at thirteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds. You are required to insert your credit spike or please move along. Thank you for your patronage.’

If my face weren’t splashed across every screen in the global city, I’d have tickled its plastic and titanium gullet with one of my charm explosives. I fingered them, tempted. But for a change common sense prevailed.

I froze an image of Bras and got my one complimentary copy, then I quit the newsstand before the servitor pissed me off further.

Outside, private ’pedes scampered up and down the streets. A few couples ambled with no real place to go. So different from the hysterical velocity of The Tert.

My nerves jangled again at the sensation of space, but in Viva it was the norm and skulking in corners was going to call attention to me.

I slowed my pace and tagged behind a group of four strollers, following them to some open parkland by the moat. They laughed and joked and threw titbits to the birds and ’gineered fish that clustered around on queue. The two men wore safari suits, one in black, one in navy and the women wore white jellyfish like me. Their suntans were so even and their skin so clear it was impossible to judge their age. Anywhere from twenty to sixty.

Living in Viva with all its nutrient-rich food and clean water definitely had its advantages, but it wasn’t perfect. According to Common Net reports, the rate of natural conception in Vivacity had dwindled to an all-time low due to the inconvenience of the whole thing. King Ban was ploughing resources into fertility pharma and PURBs - portable uterine replica birthers - as the main-stay of future beautiful, healthy citizens. One for every home!

Ironically, in The Tert there was a birth explosion. They just didn’t live for very long.

Nature’s little joke.

Seems only the weird and the poor wanted to bear and raise their own children.

I sat on one of the park chairs and tapped the nose of a porcelain gnome who gave me the tourist rap.

The gnome pronounced the last few words with a cutesy flourish.

 

I took the picture of Bras out of my kit bag and studied it a while, keeping half an eye on the water lapping in front of me. Her face, though thin and angular, looked clean. And she had new arms. Real grafts or image-generated? I wondered.

The memory of her grateful expression, her willingness to share her last food bar, haunted me. How was she fitting into life in Viva?

A police water ’pede surfaced in the moat before me, splashed about like an oversized fish, then disappeared. A short time later it happened again. After an hour of moat-watching I knew I wasn’t going to reach M’Grey that way.

Daac’s words chased around in the back of my mind . . .
Pat and Ibis can get you anywhere you want to go
. . .

Had I been too hasty blowing him and his friends off?

Whatever gripe he had with Lang had nothing to do with me. What could it hurt if he tagged along to watch? If he could get me in there . . .

I reached inside the top of my caftan and fingered the comm spike he’d given me. Public comms were everywhere in Viva, all I had to do was call.

I got up and walked towards the closest one. I had the spike out before something stopped me. Something loud enough to be a voice in my head.

I put the spike away and hustled for a train. If I hung around M’Grey much longer a police ’pede would started running checks on me. I’d come back a little before curfew. In the meantime I needed to think in a place where I wasn’t so obvious.

Time for another water.

 

Half an hour before dark I was back near M’Grey. So were a crowd of tourists coming to gawk at the floating bridge. I drifted among them, stooping, tagging on to groups so that I wasn’t obviously alone.

I manoeuvred close to the bridge, listening while it counted down and explained its own detachment procedure.

The main section, it said, was powered by six sophisticated aero engines with variable thrust control, and a bunch of fancy noise suppression gismos. With the bridge aloft all night and a no-fly zone overhead, it cut M’Grey off from the rest of the city every evening.

The whole exercise was automated, though police manned a supervision booth this end. Nothing robotic for M’Grey Island residents - they could afford humans.

As I pondered hiding on the bridge itself, the tourist blurb informed me that the movement sensors could detect anything larger than a cicada.

Feigning innocent interest I examined the outside of the booth for possibilities.

It didn’t offer a lot. The area immediately around it on the mainland side was featureless, affording no cover. The side connected to the bridge was decorated with electrified razor wire disguised as graffiti art.

I could be fried or just shot down in the open!

Agitation turned to knots in my stomach. How was I going to get across?

I fantasised about disappearing again, never having to think about Jamon or Lang or Loyl-me-Daac or Razz Retribution. But life’s curlier problems never vanish - they multiply.

When the whole show was nearly over, a small land-to-air ’pede crawled up to the booth and settled outside. I guessed it was waiting for the guards to come off duty. The booth itself looked like it was designed to survive any type of blast or attempt at forced entry, so when the bridge detached they probably just shut up shop and went home.

A glimmer of hope dawned.

I swapped my attention from the booth to the ’pede.

Maybe . . .

The last group I’d tagged on to were middle-aged out-of-towners. One of them - a blond, smooth-faced woman covered in expensive gold tattoos with her hair moulded in a replica of her own face - talked incessantly, in jerky, affected Northern Hem about how much better everything was where she came from. The others paid little or no attention to her conversation.

I smiled at her and altered my voice. ‘Fascinating though, don’t you think? And imagine,
human
guards. Not robbies.’

‘No way, honey,’ she tittered indignantly. ‘’Bout as real as my late husband’s gonads.’

I stumbled over the image, but plunged on.

‘You want a wager?’

Immediately her eyes lit up. ‘How do we prove it?’

‘Touch,’ I said decisively. ‘It’s the only way.’

She looked doubtful.

‘Five thousand global creds.’ I produced my fake and waved it under her nose.

Greed and excitement supplanted doubt on her face. ‘OK. How, then?’ she whispered.

‘Those guards are about to knock off duty after the bridge stabilises. All we have to do is wait around long enough for them to leave. Then we’ll politely grope them. Whadyasay?’

She glanced across at her party, then back at me and nodded.

She raised her voice. ‘Gregor, dahl. Take the others back to the Hi-tel. Be along in a while.’

‘If so, Prim.’ Gregor brushed her with a bored look then happily complied.

As Gregor and friends wandered off, Prim and I moved closer to the ’pede.

The bridge had detached now and looked close to its desired altitude. It hummed in the air like a huge dragon-fly with silver-wire wings. The last of the crowd clapped enthusiastically at the spectacle, while Prim and I fine-tuned our plan.

‘Leave to me, dahl.’ She patted my hand reassuringly and winked. ‘Done this sort of thing before.’

I stared at her curiously.

She caught my look. ‘Customs. Frisked more men than you could possibly imagine.’

Customs!
My heart went a-rhythmic.

‘Don’t we both need to check the wares?’ I managed.

She held up ten fingers. ‘Custom officer’s promise. No cheating.’

The guards left the booth soon after, checking the locks behind them and nudging each other as Prim swept over to do her thing. Under the cover of her approach, I snapped two charms loose from my bracelet.

She engaged the guards in conversation and I did my best to blend into the scenery.

A minute or two of Prim tittering and the guards thought they’d got lucky. I flicked one of the charms at the booth.

The mini-explosion sent all of them scrabbling for cover. The guards automatically flattened, facing the booth, pistols drawn. Prim crouched next to the ’pede with her hands covering her head.

I sprinted to her side and crushed the second charm - the mushroom - between my fingers.

‘Prim, suck this!’

Holding my breath, I let off a hiss of gas right into her nostrils. She wobbled under the wave of an instant hallucination and tumbled backwards.

With Prim riding high, and the guards practising counter-terrorism, I slipped around behind the ’pede and forced my way up underneath its skirt, hooking myself into the body structure. With my caftan tucked tight into my string, I waited.

I’d gambled a lot on my expectation that once the guards decided the booth was intact they would inspect the island for anything else suspicious. With a bit of luck they might even assume Prim ‘dahl’ did it.

My instinct proved right. After a fruitless sweep of the area and a brusque body search of Prim they slammed her in the back of the ’pede and charged off across the water.

Provided I could hold on against the wind and the vibration, stand the fumes and dust, and was just damn crazy enough, I might still be alive when the ’pede set down.

E
ight hours later I watched Eighteen Circe Crescent, M’Grey Island, from my post in between the concrete pylons of a private jetty. A sleek powerboat was moored next to me, its canopy crackling with the blue light of security.

After the ’pede - complete with a ’cuffed Prim who was having an intense conversation with no one about the price of hair moulds - had unwittingly dropped me on one of its island berths, I’d spent the rest of the night smothering coughing attacks from the dust I’d swallowed by hiding in the ’pede’s air-flow system, and skulking between CC camera units searching for the right address.

I found the house just before dawn, when my fatigue was greatest and my less-than-terrific ability to plan totally dysfunctional. In fact I couldn’t think much past walking right on in, dumping the files I needed on to the disk, and getting out.