The head of the French Empire’s most feared Directorate was weeping. Looking out at the grey ribbon of the swollen river, staring blankly at where the vast cross-and-double-helix hologram of the Church Geneticist should have been, if only that arrondissement had power, Lady Clare let burning tears stream down her frozen face. There was no one to see her misery, and why should she care even if there was? God knew, there was enough horror in the city for even the most hardbitten Minister of the Empire to be crying. Even one rumoured to be more brittle than glass and sharper than diamond.
Lady Clare had worked hard to get that reputation. And even if only a quarter of the things whispered about her were true, she’d still be poison to cross. As it was, they were all true, more or less, except one. The one that said Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio was her illegitimate daughter.
It was strange, Lady Clare thought grimly. The Empire was falling, the Prince Imperial was tucked up in bed with a guardsman, the army of the Reich was sitting twenty klicks away, positioned in a deadly circle around the city — and what really worried Lady Clare was the fate of some spoilt, poisonous little fifteen-year-old. A girl she didn’t even like, a girl who, if you’d asked her two weeks ago — Lady Clare was too wet and too cold not to be brutally honest about it — she’d have said she loathed. And now Lady Clare couldn’t get that vile message out of her head.
The briefest clip of LizAlec looking at a camera, a scream and then nothing but static snow. There would be a second part to that message soon enough, there had to be. Some impossible demand that Lady Clare was supposed to meet. No one would kill LizAlec before Lady Clare got the rest of the message.
Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, the kidnappers couldn’t take the risk that Lady Clare might discover LizAlec was already dead. Not that she was any closer to finding out where the original e-vid had come from. Back before the power went down, she’d accessed the SCIS machine in Brussels, called in favours at MIT and CalTek. Had Light&Magic strip away the e-vid’s dropped-in background with its luminous “Free Luna” graffito sprayed onto a glass wall. And at the end of it she was no closer to having an answer.
Hours of precious AI time had been wasted tracking the e-vid, only for Lady Clare to be told by S3’s own machine that the e-vid had been uploaded from her own terminal. The upload and download began and ended at the same terminal, the AI was prepared to guarantee it. Not that the Turing was in a condition to guarantee anything now. All that was back on Monday when the mainframe was still running. Now there wasn’t a system anywhere in the city still functioning, or not fully. Maybe one or two stand-alones might still be virus-free.
Lady Clare shrugged, sodden silk shirt sticking to her hunched shoulders, rain dripping between her small breasts to trickle down the flat expanse of her stomach. Lady Clare didn’t wear a bra: even at sixty she didn’t need it. And as for her gut, it was hard to get fat when you didn’t eat. If anorexia was a disease of the troubled teenage years, then Lady Clare’s adolescence had been infinitely protracted. Lady Clare knew why, always had done if she was honest, it was just that these days she didn’t bother to think about it.
S3’s tame psychologists insisted there was a limit to how long any one person could stay angry with their family. But Lady Clare was already well past her hate-by date. And she needed another gratuitous attack of guilt like she needed her father back from the dead.
She’d intercepted LizAlec’s mail to Fixx, of course. She’d have found the e-vid anyway when she bothered to check the Web traffic held against his name. But within two hours of LizAlec sending it an S3 semi-Turing had pulled LizAlec out of the traffic, juggling packages and breaking crypt to match the girl’s face to a visual template it had been given earlier.
Lady Clare had been shocked, which surprised her. Saddened too, though she’d been getting used to that where LizAlec was concerned. The child looked so young, so terrifyingly defenceless. Sitting there in school uniform in a public vidbooth, over-made-up eyes staring darkly at the camera, white cotton shirt unbuttoned to show small breasts. Part of Lady Clare wanted to know what Fixx would have made of that e-vid had he ever received it.
Maybe it would be worth showing him to find out. As LizAlec was being driven to Charles de Gaulle to catch her shuttle, members of a Third Section snatch squad were already blowing out the steel door to Fixx’s squalid seventh-floor studio in Bastille. The man was safely behind bars before LizAlec’s Boeing had even begun its ascent.
Sending LizAlec back to school had been the right decision, Lady Clare didn’t doubt that for a minute, and she would do it again if necessary. As the old Breton woman who cleaned Lady Clare’s office always said, shit came in threes. And she was right. Take weather from hell, toss in an out-of-control nanetic virus mixed up by some under-age mujahedin and add the black-costumed forces of the Reich, sitting in a circle around Europe’s greatest city like bored vultures.
Clare wanted to blame it all on the Germans... Of course she did, she was French. But her clinically cold intellectual standards wouldn’t let her. She knew the statistics, that was her job. There were nearly as many Frenchmen in that army as there were Prussians, and twice as many Cossacks, come to that. Whichever way you cut the figures, there were three “foreigners’ for every one Prussian.
Elective fascism... And why not Lady Clare thought, head down against the driving rain. We’ve had elective surgery, elective sexuality — what was politics if not elective? The new Reich via Cossack Black Hundreds out of Nazi nostalgia. And who was she to be surprised? If the last century could get nostalgic enough about the little Corsican corporal to allow a Napoleon back on the French throne, who should be shocked that this one got all nostalgic about that little shit corporal from Austro-Hungary?
Section Three existed to ensure the Empire’s stability, though most of what it had done over the last twenty years was soft management. From its base at Les Tourelles, the Pool monitored data, meme-checked and spun news stories along with the best. Which wasn’t to say it couldn’t get down-and-dirty when necessary... And it was necessary now, except that “now” was already too late. Lady Clare had been so busy trying to reach a compromise with the Jihad hackers, she hadn’t realized the Azerbaijani virus might rupture European opinion, spilling out decades of resentment, pulling rioting slum crowds onto provincial streets. La Haine was reborn as a thousand pirate newsfeeds switched allegiance.
Pro-compromise, pro-Jihad news stories were being quoted back at her, twisted. Her own anti-Reich memes, dropped quietly into the electronic cesspit of rumour, were being taken up as Black Hundred boasts and flung back against her. From Montana to Monaco, the same waves of racist paranoia swept the Web.
The Hundreds were no longer just a Ukrainian problem: the Reich was no longer just history. And standing on the rain-slicked tiles of her own roof, watching France’s worst-ever storm rip buildings apart, Lady Clare knew that — at least in part — she was to blame.
Lady Clare made herself look towards the Eiffel Tower then, what was left of it. Millions of tons of steel, billions of rivets, hundreds of years of history eaten away into a brutal metal stump. The virus hadn’t even finished its job, it had just aborted suddenly, switching itself off.
When the virus first struck, it looked like the most lethal side effects might be burnt out. But then the eastern edges of the city had begun to crumble, ferroconcrete projects and slum arcologies falling in on themselves. That was when Lady Clare had tried to arrange for the Prince Imperial to be given asylum in the US, for one last AirFrance Boeing to get permission to land at JFK.