Jon Grimwood - reMix

“This girl means a lot to you...?” Leon made it obvious he thought the idea of Fixx and LizAlec completely absurd. And somewhere at the back of his head, a fragment of Fixx’s mind was beginning to agree.

“I owe her,” said Fixx. Just what it was he owed her, Fixx wasn’t sure. She’d got him arrested as a terrorist, his studio smashed up, his legs ripped off. He’d been beaten, tortured, used by Lady Clare... But it wasn’t that simple. If it wasn’t for Fixx she wouldn’t have been in trouble with Lady Clare in the first place. Or maybe she would, but not over him: which meant she wouldn’t have been sent out to Planetside when St Lucius relocated...

No, Fixx told himself, she’d be stuck in Paris, starving. Waiting for the Black Hundreds to take the city, after which she’d be face down in flood water, throat cut, every orifice raped to a bloody pulp. Fixx shook his head.

“I want to take a look,” he said as calmly as he could.

“At that?” Leon demanded, nodding abruptly at the blown-out cathedral. “I mean, you want me to set you down there...?” His whole body language said, We’re fucked if you do, but I’ll try it anyway . And he would too, Fixx thought approvingly. Leon handled the battered shuttle as only a skate kid could, throwing unnecessary loops and tight trajectories. Hitting the boosters and then slamming on the retros.

“No,” said Shiori, without checking with Fixx. “The whole spindle’s dead. Take us out to the ring.” It was nothing personal, she was just busy focusing on data Fixx couldn’t see, the stuff scrolling past her eyes.

Leon shrugged and threw a left to slide the shuttle down the length of the spindle, its surface whistling by beneath them. It was like skimming sideways along the crest of an impossibly long silver hill. Slipping down the spindle, Leon aimed towards a gap between two of the radial spars.

“Sure you don’t want to check the bottom dome?” Leon asked Shiori. After her last order, he took it for granted that she was in charge and Fixx couldn’t be arsed to argue. He was too busy thinking about LizAlec.

“No,” said Shiori. “Take us out to the ring.”

Leon obediently flicked his fingers over a floating trackball and the Shockwave Rider suddenly slid away at a right angle to the central spindle, flipping over to skim low and tight along one of the radial spars that held the ring in place. At the last second, Leon flipped the shuttle up the approaching silver slope and down the other side, stopping dead as the outside edge of the ring flicked by below.

“Take it down and find a hatch,” Shiori said without looking up. She seemed to be basing all her decisions on whatever data scrolled up her Calvin wraprounds. Fixx got a burning desire to ask Shiori what she was really after. She’d been shocked by the shattered dome but not panicked. If he thought his boss’s daughter was down there he’d have been shitting bricks. Hell, he still was...

He’d had her original reason — LizAlec — and back at the love hotel he’d had her revised reason, Anchee. He just didn’t believe either of them. But he didn’t ask: if there was one thing Fixx was still good at, it was timing...

“Hold her steady,” ordered Shiori as Leon matched the speed of the shuttle with the speed of the outside edge of the ring, until both seemed to come to a sudden halt. Whether they were above The Arc or The Arc was above them was impossible to say. But they now rested ten metres from the ring’s outer edge, keeping pace, holding tight to the ring’s revolution as steadily as any ramora clinging to its shark.

Shiori clicked her fingers blindly across a tiny keyboard on her wrist, pulling up figures, sliding into the ray-traced heart of the space station below her. It wasn’t the missing girl the General’s AI had sent her after, it wasn’t even the Brotherhood’s infamous smear list of dirt on every politician who’d ever expressed doubt in Brother Michael and Sister Aaron’s God-given mission. Though no doubt the General would find a use for the list, should Shiori stumble across it.

No, what she wanted was not the General’s daughter who Shiori now knew from the General was in bed, unconscious but unhurt, at St Lucius. And certainly not whatever the little tart was called that Fixx wanted found, not for herself anyway. What Shiori wanted, what the General needed finding, were his missing ancestors. And, from what Shiori had been told, they’d arrived on The Arc wrapped round the French girl’s wrist.

And since Shiori hadn’t got a read-out on the missing shrine from the ice-cold spindle, they had got be somewhere out in the ring. Now all she had to do was get in there and find them. That, and persuade Fixx or Leon that they wanted to help her unscrew a vacuum-sealed service hatch in the skin of The Arc down below. Pick the wrong hatch and it would chop you in half as it blew out into space, to say nothing of decompressing the entire ring. Leon would know that instinctively and even Fixx might work it out eventually, if she gave him enough time.

But Shiori wouldn’t pick the wrong hatch. Not now, not ever, that was why the General employed her. Shiori shrugged and reached for a balloon suit. Her gut might be blade-scarred, her heart as cold as her reflexes were augmented but she got results. Precisely because she didn’t care how she got them. Shanghai was full of ancestor-worshipping would-bes who lived in fear of the General. She didn’t give a shit about all that, any more than she cared who ruled in Beijing.

As for her own immediate ancestors, Shiori hoped to hell they were out there howling somewhere in the void. Because you didn’t get to be like Shiori without having had some help, and Shiori had certainly had plenty.

Two hours after LizAlec realized her pod was taking her back the way she’d come the over-priced silver coffin dumped her back at The Arc . Only, when she checked the screen, there was a cargo shuttle parked between the pod and Sister Aaron’s spinning silver promise of a new Eden.

A shuttle wasn’t due for six weeks, she’d checked that herself. Fuck it, LizAlec was certain she had. There was no way one was due... Which didn’t alter the fact that a battered black Harland & Wolff was tethered to the outer edge of the ring. Whoever was piloting the thing had just parked up and tied off, like they were leaving a horse at a hitching post. LizAlec knew all about equus . Girls from St Lucius/Paris rode every Saturday morning in the Bois de Boulogne. Or at least they did back when the Parisian franchise of St Lucius was still located in the Sixth Arrondissement and the Bois had not yet been chopped down for firewood or shelter. The horses, of course, had gone the way of cats and rats, straight down the throats of hungry Parisians, just a lot faster.

Focusing in with her screen, LizAlec had to admit the shuttle hadn’t just been tied off. Someone had flash-welded a ring to the outer skin of the arc and clipped on a bounty cable made from spun monofilament.

Wreckers maybe, or truckers... They were the only highrisers who used bounty cables, at least they were on tri-D. But no trucker would choose The Arc as a stop-off, wreckers neither, now LizAlec came to think about it.

LizAlec sucked at her teeth. Like she needed to be back at The Arc when she’d been safely on her way to Earth. Though how she landed and avoided burn-up had both crossed her mind, so maybe the pod’s AI wasn’t as stupid as she thought.

LizAlec searched the screen in front of her face, searching for some icon that might activate a transmitter. She was blindside to the cargo shuttle, so just maybe The Arc didn’t know she was there. But the cargo ship must do.