Peter Hamilton - Judas Unchained

***

Four identical black Cadillac limousines drew up outside the big old converted warehouse in Darklake City’s Thurnby district. Mellanie stepped out of the first one, her expensive Fomar pumps just missing the soggy mass of leaves and paper that clogged the gutter. She’d chosen the most sober clothes from her own range to wear, a neat black jacket with slim white lines marking out a square pattern. Matching pants and a cream blouse finished off the image. This way she had a whole Paula Myo authority figure thing going for her. It felt funny coming back here as a take-no-shit professional troubleshooter, backed up by six very tough wetwired CST security operatives.

There was nobody about on the street, so they all trooped over to the door. Nothing had changed; the purple Wayside Production plaque was still on the wall outside, the couches in the tiny reception area were still snowing flakes of chrome on the floor, the scent of ozone and disinfectant hanging in the air. Mellanie went straight through reception into the narrow corridors that separated the stages. Up above her, the ancient solar collector roof creaked incessantly. Voices from one of the stages echoed around the cavernous overhead space. A stagehand came around a corner, pulling a trolley with a circular bed balanced precariously on top. He stared in astonishment at Mellanie and her escort.

“Where’s Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie asked.

“Huh?”

“Tiger Pansy, where is she?”

His hand waved limply back down the corridor. “Dressing room, I think.”

“Thank you.” Mellanie marched past him. She hadn’t actually made it as far as the dressing room before. It wasn’t hard to find, a big open area lined with lockers on one side, makeup tables along the other. The far end was a jumble of clothes racks. Several girls dressed in feathers and gold-crusted Hindu sarongs were sitting around waiting for their turn with the makeup lady, a large elderly woman in a black mourning dress. One of the girls was having her OCtattoos tuned by a sensorium technician; she was very young, an easy forty centimeters taller than Mellanie, thin bordering on malnourished, with lustrous black skin. She had a nervous yet resigned expression on her face as she watched the technician sticking modifier patches over the OCtattoos that webbed her thighs and genitalia. Something must have registered as she caught sight of Mellanie. The technician looked up from his sophisticated handheld array. Across the dressing room, the babble of conversation cut off.

“Tiger Pansy?” Mellanie called.

Someone stood up in the middle of the girls waiting to be made up. Mellanie barely recognized her; the peroxide blond hair was now orange verging on tangerine, and seemed to be all straw, standing up as if it’d been electrocuted. Reprofiling had taken the chubbiness out of her cheeks, but the thick crust of skin it’d left produced deep creases as her jaw worked away at her gum. Even before the makeup session, she still had way too much mascara around her eyes. The turquoise and topaz feathers around her chest were under a lot of strain holding her vast breasts up.

“Oh, hi, Mellanie,” she squeaked. “Watcha doin’ back here?”

“Came to see you.”

“Yeah?” Tiger Pansy giggled, a high-pitched sound drilling through Mellanie’s eardrums. “You wanna interview me? Jaycee won’t like that.”

“I’m here to offer you a job. And nobody cares what Jaycee likes, least of all me.”

“Oh, really?” a man’s voice asked.

Mellanie turned to face him. Like his studio, Jaycee hadn’t changed either, head still shaved, black clothes with the crow’s-foot wrinkles that only cheap cloth produced. “Get lost,” Mellanie said curtly.

Jaycee’s pale skin started to flush. He gave her bodyguards a quick appraisal. “Fucking say that without your friends here.”

She smiled with predatory malice. “They’re not here for my benefit; they’re here to keep you safe from me.”

“Fuck off, bitch. I mean it. You don’t come in here like you rule the universe and try to steal my fucking girls away. Tiger Pansy’s mine. You fucking got that?”

Mellanie cocked her head to one side, pursing her lips as if she were mulling over what he’d said. “No.”

“I don’t care who the fuck you think you are, fuck off now!” Jaycee yelled. “And you”—he jabbed a finger at Tiger Pansy—“you don’t go fucking anywhere. Understand?”

“Yes, Jaycee,” Tiger Pansy said meekly. Her chin quivered as she fought back tears.

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Mellanie said. She took a step toward Jaycee.

“Or what? You’ll give me a blow job?” He smiled around at the bodyguards. “Did Alessandra pass her around you guys? I hear that’s what she does: the Baron show’s whore.” His sneer turned triumphant. “Isn’t that right?” he asked Mellanie. “You’re just a fucking cheap media whore. What? You think I don’t fucking know that? Every fucker in the business knows what you are.”

Mellanie knew she should just grab Tiger Pansy and get out. Had it been anyone else but Jaycee she would have done just that. “I am not for sale,” she growled out as she took another step, putting her nose to nose. “I told you that before.” She brought her knee up.

Jaycee twisted with fast competence, bringing his own leg around protectively. Her knee skidded off the back of his thigh. His grin was mocking. “And we’ve done this befor—”

Mellanie slammed her forehead into his nose. Jaycee screamed as his cartilage made a horrible crunch. His hand came up automatically to cup his nose and stanch the blood. That was when Mellanie brought her knee up again, properly this time.

“Yeah, you’re right, this is a real déjà vu session,” she said amiably as tears flooded Jaycee’s eyes. His mouth opened in a silent screech as he fell to his knees, one hand clamped over his nose, the other over his crotch. Blood made the front of his black shirt glisten disgustingly.

The girls got out of the way fast as Mellanie walked over to Tiger Pansy. “This job, it pays so much you’ll never have to come back here. There’s a rejuvenation treatment thrown in as well. You can start over again.”

“Yeah?” Tiger Pansy asked. Her jaw worked hard on the gum as she looked at Jaycee. “Is he gonna be all right, d’ya think?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I don’t want to rush you, but I do need an answer.”

“He wasn’t last time you did that, y’know. He couldn’t get it hard for a week.”

“For which the human gene pool was very grateful. Tiger”—she put her hand on the porn starlet’s arm—“I need your help. I really do. A lot of people are depending on you.”

Tiger Pansy gave the bodyguards a resigned look. “Who do I got to fuck?”

“Nobody. It’s not like that. We’re going to link you up one-to-one for a special client. That way this client gets to find out what you feel. I came to you because you’re the best sensorium artiste there is.”

“Yeah?” Tiger Pansy grinned sheepishly. “You’re an all right girl, Mellanie, I knew it when you came in here that first day. Straightaway, I said to myself, I said, she’s class, Tiger, you should try and be more like her. I’m not, though.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Mellanie.” Tiger Pansy put her head down and whispered, “there’s this, like, medicine I need to get through the day. Special medicine. Jaycee used to get it for me. I can’t go nowhere without it.”

For some reason, Mellanie’s throat tightened to an almost-painful degree. She couldn’t remember feeling so much sympathy for anyone before. “We can get it for you, I promise. Better quality than Jaycee ever supplied. You can go anywhere, Tiger. And when you’re rejuvenated you won’t need it anymore.”