As quietly as possible — undoing velcro straps one at a time, rather than ripping them open as he usually did — Lars freed the o/lung bottle from his side and unscrewed its vacuum-proof hose. Dipping one hand into a balloon-suit pocket for the bung, Lars began to undo the front of his balloon suit.

The garment might have been a cheap Korean copy of an outdated NASA model, but it still featured a double seal down the front: the first an outer flap that folded back to reveal two nanetic edges that joined and unjoined as if by magic. Once the suit was off, he’d be able to close off the hole into his ribs, plugging the circular ceramic vent with a replaceable neoprene bung that screwed level with his skin.

Lars shuffled out of the suit as if it was an unwanted skin and stood naked in the blackness of the tiny cell, screwing the plug into his side. Then he got on with doing what he really wanted to do: take a good look at the naked girl. The most obvious difference between himself and LizAlec stuck out in front of him, but there were other, less intrusive differences, and not just that she had neater breasts.

His stomach pushed forward where her gut was flat, and his legs were wasted while hers were still muscled, thicker at the top, getting narrower as they moved down. She still stank, though. In that they were equal.

Briefly, Lars considered dragging the girl out into the passage first, away from the dead bodies, but decided not to bother. He didn’t want to make trouble for himself and besides, she looked glued to the spot.

“Lars?” Her face still searched the darkness, scared and anxious. He’d stopped moving, Lars realized. She’d been tracking him by sound and now there was silence, broken only by the thud of some distant air-scrubber.

“You still here?”

“Yeah,” Lars thought, dropping to a crouch, one hand reaching for the transparent lock-knife. He was still here.

The rape didn’t go the way Lars planned. To start with, yeah, but not by the end, no way... Moving silently in towards LizAlec, Lars squatted near her feet, not yet touching her, his brown eyes hungrily swallowing the sight of her. He was hungry in a way no holoporn made him hunger, frightened too. His whole body shaking as sweat gathered under his arms and trickled thin and hot down his ribs.

Mostly plans just happened in his head, but this time Lars couldn’t suss out where to start: not when he had one knife and a pair of elegant legs to deal with, and only two hands. In the end, he jammed the zytel blade down in the dirt and grabbed LizAlec roughly by the ankles, pulling her towards him so she tipped backwards, and almost split her skull.

“Little fucker!” LizAlec kicked out, the heel of her foot catching Lars on the shoulder, pushing him back onto his bare arse. She kicked again, freeing her other foot, and began to scramble to her feet.

Shock was the first thing Lars felt, then burning anger. His shoulder was numbed down to nothing, flash-frozen by the blow. Still sitting on the ground, he drove his fist into her leg, hard, taking her down. And while she was still protesting, Lars grabbed the knife and held the blade to her throat.

LizAlec froze into utter silence.

“I’m not going to get killed for it,” she said at last.

That was good, Lars nodded to himself in agreement, he didn’t want her dead either. With one hand he reached forward and found a wrist, pushing LizAlec’s arm up above her head. There wasn’t quite room to stretch her out, so Lars let go the wrist and grabbed an ankle instead, jerking her body towards where he was squatting between her legs.

“Okay, okay...” LizAlec shuffled her body away from the wall, her words more irritated than scared.

“Good,” said Lars, not sure if he was talking about the action or her. She was beautiful, he knew that. Blind to the night and not the shape he’d expected, but her brown skin was as smooth as glass and her violet eyes were lit from inside with splinters of fire. And as for her breasts...

Lars drove the knife into the dirt next to LizAlec’s head and reached for a breast, feeling it small and hard beneath his callused fingers. Instinctively, his thumb and finger closed round a nipple and he closed his eyes, tasting its texture, hearing the soft darkness of the puckered circle around it.

Desire exploded in his mind. Not just to taste her, to feel her Earth-hard body crushed beneath his, but to own her totally. To squat forever like a wine-dark memory on the inside of her mind. To hear the full bittersweet symphony of her fear.

Lars sunk his face into her hair and inhaled, nuzzled his mouth below one small breast and bit, tasting sweet blood, ignoring her frantic lurch of protest. Hungrily, Lars uncurled the fingers gripping her nipple and cupped the salt sweetness between her legs, rough fingers curling up through damp hair.

Salt, blood, darkness.

He’d found her.

Found what all the tri-Ds and holoporn couldn’t reveal.

Rape. Pure and simple. No excuses. No mitigation. Not that there ever was for terrorism, murder or rape. LizAlec’s views on that were fixed firm. It came from having an ex-Chief Imperial Prosecutor for a mother.

She couldn’t see Lars but she could hear him, feel and smell him. He stank worse than she did, his fat unwashed body rank with sweat. She could feel him prodding clumsily against her and hear his frantic hunger sour into anger as he missed every time.

LizAlec took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling her heart steady. Ignoring Lars as he tensed above her, LizAlec reached up with one hand and found his face, fingers pushing under the badly cut shock of hair to touch his temple.

Lars stopped his struggle, briefly puzzled by her touch. And then fire exploded like lightning inside his head, knocking him from bright light into deepest empty darkness.

LizAlec smiled.

Chapter Twelve

Wide-eyed & Legless

“Here, put it on.”

The police sergeant gave Fixx back his left arm, which puzzled Fixx since it wasn’t two hours since the squat Gascon had been encased in a slop-down, happily beating him to pulp with a short length of rubber hose. Only this time the sergeant was wearing his best uniform, his blue jacket pulled tight over his jutting belly.

“Put it on, you fuckwit.” The sergeant raised his hand and Fixx ducked. Over the past two weeks those five minutes of explosive mid-morning violence had become something of a ritual.

Five minutes wasn’t prescribed in any training manual, it was how long it took the man to get out of breath. Ten years ago the Gascon had been able to manage fifteen minutes, and ten years before that he’d been able to keep it going for what seemed like forever.

The fat man sighed and pulled in his gut. Even he’d heard of Freud.

The Préfecture Imperiale had more sophisticated pleasures at its disposal, of course, from the effective but tek-crude delights of a Matsui taser to the full cerebral meltdown of a Bayer-Rochelle parasite squid, squids were meant for medical use only, but it was obvious even to an illiterate that any machine capable of reading sensations could be reverse-engineered to provide them as well. And Fixx was many things, from a crystal-head to eight years older than he admitted, but tek-illiterate wasn’t one of them.

Luckily, the sergeant was the old-fashioned type. Neanderthal.

“Put your fucking arm on.” The man’s voice was raw with a breakfast of Gauloises and cheap alcohol. Fixx didn’t blame him. The only way he could have hacked the sergeant’s job would have been to blunt his edges too.

Sighing heavily, Fixx balanced himself on the hard plastic bed and slotted the stump of his left arm into a shining black prosthetic. The stump had been bleeding ever since the sergeant first ripped Fixx’s arm off and putting it back stung badly as prosthetic meshed with bloody flesh.