So Vile a Sin (5 page)

The next table seemed devoted to history. The viewer displayed the title page of
Greed Incorporated: The Rise of the
Space Corporations
by M. Ashe. There were a scatter of titles dealing with the twenty-sixth century that Genevieve recognized from school, the Cyber wars, Imperium Draco, the final defeat of the Daleks. And more poetry but related, the Fitzgerald translation of
The Lament of the Non-Operational
– a forbidden text.

Genevieve frowned. It all seemed inconsistent with her image of Lady Forrester the socialite. Of course it could always be that the Forrester children did their school work here. She felt a twinge of envy; she would have loved to spend her school days among so much history.

She stepped over to the last table and noticed the painting for the first time. A wide canvas mounted in a gap between the shelves made by a twenty-eighth century secretaire. A portrait in soluble polymers. Two teenage girls against an impossible sweep of Ionian landscape.

37

If the background was fanciful, Genevieve judged that the figures were painted from life. One, on the left, was unmistakably the Baroness, dressed in the same costume of red blankets and jewellery as she wore that evening. Only younger, thirty, maybe thirty-five years younger. A teenage girl then. In her right hand she held the Forrester standard. The second figure, another young woman, clearly related to the Baroness, a sister – but no sister was listed among the Forrester titles.

Her features not exactly plain but somehow severe. Whereas the young Lady Forrester stared upward and out of the painting in the prescribed romantic manner, the other seemed preoccupied, not so much resentful of the whole process, more uncaring. She thinks she has better things she could be doing, thought Genevieve.

‘Hello,’ said a voice behind her. ‘What are you doing here?’

Genevieve started guiltily and turned. She found herself looking down at a young girl, six or seven years old, with black eyes and an unmistakably flat aristocratic nose. An echo of the girls in the portrait. She was flanked by two kinderbots, one shaped like a rabbit, the other a matt black spider.

‘I was looking at this painting,’ said Genevieve. ‘My name is Genevieve. What’s yours?’

The girl squinted suspiciously at Genevieve. A red blanket was wound around her waist as a skirt and knotted at the hip; bracelets hung on her ankles and wrists. There was a wiry strength about her. Not an easy kid to handle, thought Genevieve.

‘I’m Thandiwe,’ said the girl. The Baroness’s youngest daughter then. She indicated the kinderbots. ‘And this is Mr Fact and Mr Fiction.’

Personalized education bots, expensive, more expensive still because they were probably augmented to act as bodyguards. Mr Fiction, the rabbit, would be the more dangerous because it was cuddly.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Genevieve. She reached out to shake Thandiwe’s hand. Mr Fiction’s glossy brown eyes swivelled to track the movement. The girl shook hands solemnly.

‘You belong to Duke Walid,’ said Thandiwe.

‘I’m his concubine. Do you know what that means?’

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Mr Fiction did a sudden back flip and yelled, ‘Look at me, look at me!’

Thandiwe giggled. ‘They think I shouldn’t know but I do,’ she said. ‘They get very excited about some things. Watch.’ She turned to face Mr Fiction, who was bouncing up and down.

‘Shampoo!’

Mr Fiction looked stem. ‘Bad word. I’m going to tell Mama.

You said a rude word.’

‘Won’t you get into trouble?’ asked Genevieve.

Thandiwe shook her head. ‘This is the best bit. Mr Fact, what is the definition of the word
shampoo
?’

The spider scuttled to attention. ‘Shampoo,’ it said. Mr Fiction squealed with outrage and brushed his whiskers. ‘Noun, ancient American, a personal hygiene product designed for human hair.

To shampoo, verb, ancient American –’ This was too much for Mr Fiction, who turned on Mr Fact and started yelling, ‘Bad word rude word,’ over and over again.

Thandiwe stepped away and left the two robots to argue it out.

‘How long will they do that for?’

‘Until I ask them another question. Silly, isn’t it?’

‘Bad word, rude word, naughty word, I’m going to tell Mama.’

‘Very silly,’ said Genevieve. She indicated the painting. ‘Do you know who the other girl is?’

‘That’s my Aunty Roz,’ said Thandiwe. ‘She was an Adjudicator.’

Which explained why she wasn’t listed among the titled members of the family. As with the Landsknechte and Imperial Bureaucracy, an Adjudicator was required to forswear their family title upon joining the order. A supposed hedge against the aristocracy gaining too secure a grip on the levers of power.

Of the services, only the Imperial Space Navy allowed its officers to retain their titles – a reminder of a time when the security of the Empire rested directly on the shoulders of the great families.

An Adjudicator. That was more than she’d found out in a month. ‘What do you know about your Aunty Roz?’ said Genevieve.

39

‘Not much. She died before I was born. But Mama says I look just like her.’

At midnight, Leabie gathered her guests at the edge of the great balcony, looking down into the artificial forest below.

Artificial wasn’t the right word, thought Genevieve. The plants and the birds were as real as any you’d find on Earth. Even the gravity down there was Earth-normal, far cheaper than modifying the creatures.

The guests formed a long line along the edge of the balcony, leaning on the railing with drinks in hand, chattering. Spotlights were moving over the dark canopy of the forest. The Baroness had promised them all a surprise, something she could guarantee they’d never seen before.

Thandiwe had insisted on accompanying Genevieve back to the party. And of course Mr Fact and Mr Fiction had insisted on accompanying Thandiwe. The little girl was something of a celebrity, dukes and barons making a point of chatting with her under the watchful eyes of the kinderbots. Genevieve had caught Leabie watching her youngest daughter, smiling.

The rumour mill had it that little Thandiwe’s Aunty Roz hadn’t died, that this was a cover story for something far more interesting. Something with official scandal attached. There would be people talking about it at the party tonight, carefully out of the earshot of the Baroness herself. Genevieve had heard every imaginable rumour during her research. Perhaps she’d done something dashing, like joining the resistance. Perhaps she’d fled to an outer colony after being busted for tax evasion.

You couldn’t find out from Centcomp. There was a hole in the datascape. The closer you got to Roslyn Sarah Inyathi Forrester, the less you could find out, until right at the centre of the picture there was nothing. Someone had done an incomparable job of erasing all trace of the younger Forrester sister.

Duke Walid, for reasons best known to himself, wanted to find out why.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Leabie’s voice. She hovered above them on a comfortable AG seat, the spotlights flashing 40

across her in their twisting manoeuvres. ‘If you’ll direct your attention to the forest below.’

There were shapes moving down there, among the trees.

Genevieve leant over the balcony, wishing the spotlights would pick out something and stay with it. Intriguing flashes of motion, something emerging from the forest…

‘I’d like to introduce you to the latest microreclamation project of House Forrester. Extinct for almost two millennia.’

Whatever those things were, they were
big
. A hush was rippling through the crowd, stilling the coughs and the clinking of ice cubes in glasses.

‘
Indlovu
,’ said Lady Forrester. ‘The elephant.’

‘Ooooo,’ said everyone.

The elephants meandered out of the forest, probably coaxed out by hidden bots. They were oblivious to the crowd high overhead.

They were bloody enormous. Quadrupeds, bodies slung low with weight. An extra limb at the front, like a tail. Genevieve could see a baby
indlovu
trailing after its mother, a miniaturized version of the adults.

‘Just to show you we never do anything on the small scale,’

laughed Leabie.

The grand clock struck a chime. Everyone realized it was midnight.

‘To absent friends!’ called Leabie, raising her glass. ‘Wherever they may be.’

Among the cheers and the laughter, Genevieve looked across to little Thandiwe, deep in serious conversation with Mr Fact. She wondered how Roz Forrester was celebrating the New Year.

Somewhere, out there.

41

Part One

Iphigenia

42

1

Fury, Aegisthus

2 January 2982

There was a smell to Fury; a familiar smell.

It belonged to too many people and overloading life-support and the chemically tainted drizzle that precipitated from the dome above. It smelt of corruption and poverty and decay and violence, of backstreet deals and backstreet pleasures.

Roz Forrester took a deep breath of it as she stepped out of the civilian transmat on the Piazza Tereshkova. It reminded her of home.

The city crouched under its dome on the airless Zhongjian Plateau, surrounded by the black remnants of spoil heaps and the opencast pits that were visible from orbit. At night they cut non-shadows from the barely visible spectrum of Clytemnestra – the failed sun that squatted on Aegisthus’s tidally locked horizon.

Like Kibero, thought Roz, remembering her father using his hands to explain the orbital dynamics of Jupiter’s moons – his face as the sun, his fists for Jupiter and Io. Sunrise came when the moon orbited out of the shadow of its primary and into the warmth of her father’s smile. Remembered, too, how an orbit like that made for long days, and longer nights.

Agamemnon, the sun. Clytemnestra, the gas giant. Its moons, Aegisthus, where the military had their base; Orestes, the Ogrons’ homeworld, where the pitiful war dragged on; 43

Electra and Iphigenia, empty rocks of no account.

It was noisy daylight when she emerged from the transmat complex and into the piazza. She set off in a random direction, walking briskly to confuse any surveillance. If they were going to take her, it would be right there, outside the transmat, while she was still unarmed and dizzy from the reality shift.

Piazza Tereshkova was an oval of parkland surrounded by corporate architecture going as high as the dome would allow, truncated versions of the towers that sprouted on every civilized world in the Empire. The company logos were picked out in good-quality daylight holograms, in a baroque font style that Roz associated with the fifties and the frontier assignments she’d pulled as a novice. Easy enough to put a spy eye or Kirlian sensor on a roof and cover the whole piazza.

Pattern recognition.

Assume that there had to be two thousand plus bodies in the piazza at any one time, way too much information for the smart bit of a sensor to process. It would have to be watching for patterns in the crowd, only keying into an individual that fell outside its parameters of normal behaviour.

Like zigzagging around to flush out any surveillance.

Roz kept on walking in a straight line until she fetched up against a table belonging to a Jeopard tisane bar, one of many that had spilt out over the walkway. She sat down, put her carryall on the chair beside her and shouted for some service. As if she’d planned on coffee all along.

Act like you own the place, sayeth the Doctor.

‘I don’ sell gun, I sell frock only.’

The stall was one of many that stood between the dying oak trees of the Boulevard Gagarin – a box of plasticized aluminium with an AG jack on each corner to hold it up. Lingerie was folded into neat stacks on the makeshift counter, the topmost garments unfolded with geometric precision to show silk linings, slashes and isometric triangles of imitation Martian lace. Satin gowns were pinned open like varicoloured butterflies against a makeshift plastic backboard.

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Bras, garterbelts and bikini briefs hung from rails like a colony of ragged fishnet bats.

‘What you want gun for? Pretty human-looking lady like you.’

Roz was sweating in the humidity, conscious of the press of the crowd at her back. ‘Business,’ she said.

The stallholder was a Qink, a squat non-humanoid, asymmetric and five armed. A stumpy round brain case bobbed on the end of a muscular column protruding from its chest cavity. Grey-green blood vessels crawled over the skull, pulsing to the beat of its ferociously complicated cardiovascular system. Roz knew that a Qink could suck its brain case right back into its chest, where articulated ribs would slam across like a portcullis.

She also knew that the Qink was lying. Qinks always sold guns. Part of their culture, at least according to the refresher courses Roz used to take. Centcomp had called the courses Practical Xenoculture for Adjudicators, but for everyone else it was the Big Bag O’ BEMs.

She vaguely remembered something about the juxtaposition of guns and frocks, death and commerce, love and war.

‘How about I buy a frock first?’ asked Roz.

The pulsing skull bobbed up and down in agreement. Roz haggled and ended up with a thigh-length slip dress in yellow satin. The Qink threw in a pair of matching PVC mules and a gauss microwire pistol. Buying a lace underwired camisole got her a spare clip and a hydrogen-xenon battery pack.

She bundled the lot into her carryall and paid the Qink in redeemable bearer bonds – credit notes backed by one of the Doctor’s convenient bank accounts. Technically illegal, such a transaction was OK out here on the rim. But if they headed back towards the core systems she was going to have do something about her ID.

‘You good human-looking lady,’ said the Qink sadly as she walked away. ‘You shouldn’t be in the death business.’

Roz checked the pistol in an alleyway between makeshift walls of laminated glass fibre. It was designed to fire wire-thin flechettes of depleted uranium. Not a lot of stopping 45

power, but on full auto it could empty the clip of sixty in less than a second.