So Vile a Sin (9 page)

Mei Feng stood at the centre of a circle of debris where the vegetable stall used to be. Roz saw an arm protruding from a mound of broken wood, a limbless torso driven into the wall behind. Human or alien? Roz couldn’t tell.

Damn, she thought, collateral.

The pistol had opened up Mei Feng’s chest, pulverized the breastbone and ribs. The remains of her pants-suit jacket hung down like ragged curtains. Inside the bloody cavity Roz saw thousands of tiny fingers – flickers of writhing, purposeful movement.

Mei Feng’s head twitched from side to side, bloody hair flying, the spikes protruding from her eye sockets zeroing in on Roz.

The mouth opened to its full extent and then kept on opening.

The skin of the cheeks split open to show tendons pulled as taut as cables before snapping. The jawbone broke with an audible crack. A ropy cable came vomiting out of Mei Feng’s mouth.

Red gold in the orange sunlight, it flailed towards Roz, its tip a glittering buzz-saw.

Roz shot low this time, the wire flechettes chewing gouges in the pavement and obliterating Mei Feng’s legs at the knees. The N-form lost its balance as the human body it was infesting slumped over. The flashing buzz-saw was whipped out of alignment and buried itself in paving stones.

Roz darted down an alleyway that she hoped connected with the Boulevard Gagarin. Street children slept in huddles against 67

the filthy walls. A brief glimpse of pinched alien faces as she jumped a tangle of legs. She heard sirens behind her as Fury’s hotchpotch of military and civil security forces responded.

The alleyway was blocked off at the end by a two-metre breezeblock wall, red-and-yellow-striped dumpsters lined up against it. Roz clambered on top of one, jumped, and tried to vault over the top. She found herself sliding down the inclined roof of a stall on the other side. The rough recycled wasteboard scraped at her cheek. She twisted, came off the edge feet first, and landed among piles of brightly coloured dresses.

‘Hey,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I say you dangerous lady.’

Roz would have said something pithy but she was all out of breath.

There was a sucking noise, followed by splintering wood. The base of an oak tree to her left shattered. She caught a glimpse of Mei Feng’s torso scuttling along on three pairs of golden legs before the remains of the tree fell between them.

It was teleporting, or traversing dimensional tucks, or whatever. Roz knew she had to do something about that. She ran through her options as she sprinted for the Piazza Tereshkova.

She needed to lay down some subspace interference.

Hyperwave would probably do it, but that was a problem. Most civilian communications would be going through Fury’s main uplink to Aegisthus Station, and the military’s rigs would be too well guarded. Which left the Imperial Communications Company, whose office was just off the Piazza.

All she needed now was a plan.

The thing about hyperwave, the thing that made the whole ecology of the human datascape possible, was that it was always switched on. Once a transmission station was in resonance with another station, a continuous signal had to be broadcast in order to maintain the link.

This standby signal could carry information in low bandwidth packets at almost no cost. You could send text messages from practically any terminal in the Empire and, some people maintained, beyond.

68

However, once the information density passed a certain threshold – say that needed to send real-time simcord images – an active hyperwave signal was required. In the ferociously competitive world of media-feed news coverage, a correspondent had to have their images, words and instant analysis of a news event zapped back to their own particular clearing house practically as the event happened. If not sooner. Some of the bigger media feeds had their own hyperwave facilities but everyone else used ICC – reliable, ubiquitous and reputedly incorruptible.

A correspondent was coming out the front of the ICC office as Roz ran up. She didn’t slow down, caught the door with her shoulder before it closed and slammed it back open. The foyer was crowded, faces turning to watch her as she barged through.

Some of them were POVs, pupils ringed by the harsh green of the artificial iris. No doubt she was being recorded.

There was a security door at the far end. Roz looked for a victim – had to be small, human and as vulnerable-looking as possible. She spotted a young woman, tisane-coloured skin, black curly hair, large brown eyes.

Roz grabbed the woman around the chest and swung her around. She wanted the woman between herself and any potential heroes. She made sure that the pistol was visible to the whole room as she jammed it under the woman’s chin. ‘Get back,’ she yelled. ‘I’m not joking, get back.’

There were yells but no screams, these were experienced people.

‘Open the door,’ screamed Roz. ‘Open the door or the human bitch gets it.’ Somewhere, she knew, someone was watching her on a monitor, trying to figure out the angles and remember what it was the training manuals said about hostage situations.

Roz made sure her back was to the security door. ICC had in-house security – Roz guessed two maybe three guards. She’d worked with ICC in the past. Competent, she remembered, and fairly well trained. But it was hard to keep an edge in a job like that, sitting at a console, watching monitors and filing complaints. Not like a street-level Adjudicator: working the 69

undertown gave you an edge or a horizontal retirement – one or the other.

Three guards, she decided. One would stay with the security console – the other two would be getting ready behind the security door. They couldn’t negotiate, not with a terrorist with a gun and a crowd of possible victims. They’d use neural stunners, open the doors and shoot her in the back, playing the percentages, hoping that her finger didn’t convulse on the trigger and blow the hostage’s head off.

They’ll be nervous, she thought, hell, they’ll be terrified – I know
I
would be. Both of them sweating, the stunners slick in their hands. That little cop prayer going through their heads –
oh
Goddess please don’t let me mess up let me do this right don’t let
anyone get dead
.

The seals on an automatic security door make a sound just before they open. You have to be listening for it.

Roz pivoted when she heard it and threw her hostage through the door just as it opened. The woman collided with one of the guards. The other, Roz noted with approval, was in a kneeling firing stance. It was a good tactic because the height differential gave an attacker two separate targets. If you were lucky the few moments it took them to choose could make all the difference.

Roz kicked him in the arm, he fell backward, his stunner skittering across the floor. The other guard, a woman, was trying to untangle herself from the hostage. Roz smacked her in the side of the head with the pistol and she fell to her knees, dragging the hostage with her.

Roz slapped her hand on the door control, sealing it shut. The male guard went scrambling for his stunner. Roz stepped on his hand and scooped it up for herself. She checked the setting, made sure it
was
non-lethal, and shot him.

She turned back to find the hostage and the female guard staring at her. They had identical expressions of shock, surprise and fear. Roz frowned. ‘For Goddess’ sake,’ she said, ‘show a little backbone.’

She made the guard lie down in the recovery position and then shot her too.

‘What is it you want?’ asked the hostage.

70

‘Beats me lady,’ said Roz as she dragged her towards the control suite. ‘I only just got here.’

The control suite was all drapes and thick, sound-deadening carpet. A large simcord screen displayed the ICC network, a mesh of fine lines across the Empire. There were repeater screens around the room, each one showing the current status of a hyperwave generator. Roz counted nine in all. Even with the soundproofing she could hear their deep, almost subliminal hum.

She thought suddenly of Mother of Nobody and the laugh that could rattle glasses across the bar. The single technician monitoring the screens looked up in surprise – obviously no one had bothered to tell her what was going on.

‘Listen very carefully and nobody will get hurt,’ said Roz.

‘Apart from those two out there, you mean,’ said her hostage.

‘No no no,’ said Roz. ‘You’re not supposed to be sarcastic.

You’re supposed to engage my sympathy so I’ll start thinking of you as a person and therefore be less inclined to blow your brains out. Didn’t you get any training for this situation?’

‘Training for this?’ said the woman. ‘I’m a virtual wardrobe assistant. I put together outfits for Allison Aideed. You know –

the media face?’

‘Sorry,’ said Roz. ‘I thought you were a journalist.’

‘Oh, that makes everything all right.’

Roz flung out her arm and pointed the microwire pistol at the technician who had been edging towards the door. ‘You,’ she said, ‘sit down at the console. And you,’ she told her hostage,

‘stand next to her.’

Roz moved to a position where she could cover both the women and the door. ‘I want you to record something,’ she said.

‘Can you do that?’

The technician nodded.

‘OK,’ said Roz and took a deep breath. ‘This is the Front for the Liberation of Orestes. We demand the unconditional withdrawal of all human forces and their running-dog lackey imperialist colonist sympathizers. We also demand reparations, an end to the practice of mixing good rocks with bad rocks and a return of the big scary orange monsters. If our demands are not met within four hours, we will begin to eat our hostages.’ Roz 71

grinned at the two women who paled visibly. ‘Put that on a continuous repeat and broadcast it on all nine generators at full power.’

‘You don’t want to do that,’ said the technician. ‘That’ll cause a subspace interference pattern and your message will get broken up.’

‘What would be the point in that?’ asked the wardrobe assistant.

Roz sighed. ‘The point is, one, I’m a vicious sociopathic terrorist and don’t need a reason to do anything, and two, I’m pointing a gun at you. Now will you please just do as I ask?’

The technician tapped a few keys. The generator hum became noticeably louder. ‘They’ll burn out in ten minutes,’ she said.

‘Ten minutes is all I need,’ said Roz and shot both of them with the stunner.

Which just left security guard number three, who was either following procedure and screaming for the security services or doing something foolish. Roz hoped he was following procedure

– she didn’t have time for something foolish.

She emptied the last of her wiregun’s clip into the lock of the control suite’s door, hopefully sealing it long enough for her to get the full ten minutes’ worth of jamming. There was no sign of the third guard as she made her way to the service entrance at the back, and her opinion of ICC security went up. Faced with a siege the security forces were likely to be cautious, especially since the media were already on the scene. Roz grinned; she’d hated sieges, hated the inaction and the feeling that someone else was setting the agenda.

The building service bay was clearly marked in Imperial Standard and the big colourful pictograms that Roz assumed were for the benefit of particularly stupid Ogrons. She didn’t have time for caution, just ran out between the delivery vans, hoping that the security forces hadn’t had time to surround the building yet.

The alley was deserted. Roz did a quick visual scan for snipers on the rooftops – nothing. There were sirens in the distance but getting closer. The entrance tunnel to the foundry was west of her, on the other side of the Piazza Tereshkova. She checked her 72

watch. She had nine minutes. She wasn’t going to make it on foot.

She requisitioned a delivery van. The Jeopard in the driver’s seat took one look at her and jumped out through the window.

Thank Goddess the sirens weren’t between her and where she needed to get.

The N-form caught up with her in the foundry. The sound of it vomiting out through a tear in space-time was magnified by the slab-sided shapes of the dead machinery. There was nothing left of Mei Feng any more, at least nothing visible.

Roz stood very still, as though petrified by terror. She backed away slowly as Mei Feng came forward.

‘Did you really think you could get away?’ said the N-form, in a calm and reasonable voice.

‘Listen,’ said Roz. She held out the DataStream™ she was holding. ‘Everything I learnt is here in this palmtop. You can take it, no one else knows. You can let me go.’ She rubbed her thumb across a button on the DataStream.

Mei Feng continued to wobble towards her. ‘We know all about your encounter with our sibling, but that was a damaged unit, whereas we are fully functional. We assure you that we will not make the same mistakes –’

One million tons of dwarf star alloy smashed down on the N-form from above. The concussion knocked Roz on to her back.

‘Goddess,’ she said out loud. ‘That thing liked to talk.’

She found another hotel room, crawled inside, and smoked an entire pack of Yemaya Strikes.

Outside, she could hear sirens everywhere. Given what had happened the last time they’d encountered an N-form, she’d managed to keep the damage down to a surprising minimum.

Given what had happened last time.

They’d be coming for her, Mr Cheesecloth and whoever he was working for. Even a green-walled, cigarette-burnt hole like this one would have some securicam, somewhere. She was surprised they hadn’t got here already. Maybe she’d just given them one hell of a fright, and they were waiting to see what she’d do next.

73

The gun was in her hand and aimed before she even knew it.

‘Who the living hell are you!’ she yelled.

The tall, curly-headed stranger just raised his hands. ‘It’s me,’

he said.

‘Jesus,’ coughed Roz. ‘I nearly swallowed my cigarette. Who are you?’

‘I’m the Doctor,’ said the stranger.

She looked at him. She’d never seen him before. Tall, his curly head nearly bumping on the low ceiling. He was wearing a coat like a fairground performer. She half expected him to start juggling.