There was little she didn’t know about this man’s history. And most of it she would have been glad to forget, especially the bits after LizAlec came into the equation. It had been going on for over a year and she hadn’t known. Minister for Internal Security, the ultimate head of S3 and she didn’t even have a clue until just before Christmas... When Lady Clare got the first hint of what was going on, she’d tagged Fixx in her head as a social retard but nothing more, not dangerous to her or LizAlec. Except that wasn’t how LizAlec’s diary read. It seemed this was the creep LizAlec had chosen as her first lover... The kind of shit who could take a fourteen-year-old innocent to his bed without even asking her name.

Not that Lady Clare needed to have that last fact checked; LizAlec had thrown it in her face, on the drive out to the shuttle port at Charles de Gaulle.

Pulling off her black ultrasuede gloves, Lady Clare stalked over to Fixx’s narrow bed and stood in front of him, legs apart. Three vicious slaps slammed into his face. Back, forward, back. The last blow toppled him sideways into a heap on the bed. Even the sergeant looked shocked.

“Feeling better?” Fixx asked, pushing himself upright. There was blood running from a split in his bottom lip.

Lady Clare shook her head and reached for his right arm, the only limb that wasn’t a prosthetic. She wanted to snap it at the elbow and grind the jagged edges against each other but she didn’t. Instead Lady Clare made herself step back a pace and let her arms rest at her sides. The man had no idea how difficult that was for her to do.

“Finished?” Fixx asked and shot Lady Clare his most irritating smile. It wasn’t the brightest thing he’d ever done. Turning her back on Fixx, Lady Clare reached for a Korean-made ceramic-and-copper taser velcroed to the sergeant’s belt. It was Fixx’s bad luck that the manufacturers in Seoul had designed it without including steel.

She saw sudden worry fire up in his silver eyes and it was her turn to smile. Where to start depended on what it was you wanted from the victim. Abject terror was easy: from the relative subtlety of the underside of the tongue to the obviousness of exposed testicles, it took a matter of seconds only. There were other places... just inside the anus was always effective for humiliation. Eyeballs were good for instant panic. But that wasn’t what she wanted.

“Gloves,” she told the major, who made to pass the woman her own discarded pair until he saw her frown. Hastily he reached for the sergeant’s heavy pair of mitts and thrust his thin fingers into them, stretching the rubber.

“This isn’t necessary,” said Fixx, eyes fixed to her hand. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it...”

The unique selling point about the new Korean tasers was that they were pressure-sensitive. The more Lady Clare pressed down on the button, the brighter the spark... “Do what?” Lady Clare demanded. The taser felt light in her hand, pleasingly clinical in its white ceramic finish. She thumbed the button and watched jagged lightning dance from one electrode to the other.

“Do what?”

“Whatever you want,” Fixx said quickly. “You’re S3. First you hurt people, then you sympathize, then they do what you want. A kid I know told me...”

“Hold him.” Lady Clare demanded and the major grabbed Fixx by the shoulders.

“Face down...” Lady Clare ordered and waited while the major pushed the suddenly struggling Fixx flat on the bed.

Lower spine?

Neck?

Lady Clare ran the taser lightly down his spine, from neck to buttocks, increasing thumb pressure as she went. By the time she reached his lower spine, a gurgling Fixx was bucking under the hiss of sparks, muscles locked rigid with pain across his back. Flecks of froth dotted his lips.

This was the man... Lady Clare looked down, seeing the naked buttocks, the broad shoulders, the bloody stumps of his legs, though those wouldn’t have been there. This was the man who...

Oh fuck it. She tossed the taser onto the bed beside Fixx and nodded to the major. On cue, the man stood back, his piano-players having left bruised circles across Fixx’s shoulders

“You can go,” Lady Clare told the major and waited for him to tell her it was against regulations. But all the man did was toss rubber gloves onto the bed, nod for the fat sergeant to leave first and click the door quietly behind him. If he had any sense he’d go straight up the concrete stairs and out onto the rain-slicked cobbles of the Île de la Cité, and then keep going, right to the outskirts where he could buy a new identity and lose himself in the teeming mass that passed for humanity. Then all he had to do was stand and Sieg heil the Black Hundreds as they came marching in.

But he wouldn’t. Loyalty might be bred into the bone, but the procurété didn’t choose its bulls for intelligence or intuition. The major would go and read something obscure by Barthes at his club, while the sergeant would camp out upstairs in the NCOs’ Mess and drink bad Megrib coffee laced with cheap Normandy marc while nicking though frames of holoporn. Always assuming the system wasn’t down again.

Lady Clare might not know their names, but she knew how her men thought, even the insignificant ones. When she’d finished, the sergeant would stagger back down and expect to scrape Fixx off the tiled floor with a shovel, because shit shovelling was what the police did these days.

But instead of reaching for the taser to start it all over again, Lady Clare pulled a military hypodermic from her pocket and blasted 50ml of endorphin through the skin of Fixx’s neck. Switching the cartridge, she followed the endorphin with 100ml of seratonin and then 200mg of coproximol.

Pain slid away and Fixx suddenly felt both calm and slightly elated, which even he realized was pretty weird, given the discarded taser on the bed and the streaks of vomit drying on his chin. All the same, he didn’t let logic get in the way of his relief.

Indecent acts... It was odd, thought Lady Clare while looking at Fixx, it was odd the way sometimes the weapon you really needed was the one closest at hand. There were two cases against Fixx that involved indecent acts and only one of them concerned LizAlec. The other one, the earlier one, the really obscene one, involved illegal activity with a computer on the Moon.

“My daughter,” Lady Clare said but got no further.

Fixx nodded. The bitch was who he thought she was. Just a bit further up the greasy pole than LizAlec had led him to believe. “LizAlec,” he said, “what about her?”

“Kidnapped,” said Lady Clare, obscurely proud that not a single tremor betrayed the blackness inside her. She might feel old as sin but she wasn’t going to demean herself in front of Fixx, at least not more than she already had.

“Where?”

“The Arrivals Hall at Planetside...”

“You sent her?” Taser or not, Fixx didn’t bother to keep the contempt out of his voice. “How could you be that fucking stupid?” Shaking his head, Fixx caught sight of the abandoned Ted Brewer violin, and he nodded towards it with his chin. “And now that’s meant to make me want to go after her?”

She could tell him she’d sent LizAlec back to St Lucius for her own safety, because she’d know the Reich would move on Paris as soon as the virus struck, but Lady Clare didn’t bother, she didn’t believe it herself. Instead Lady Clare wondered if Fixx knew he was seconds away from writing his own suicide note and decided he just didn’t care. Either the man was tired of life or she’d pumped in too much coproximol.

“That’s what you want, right? You want my help?”

Lady Clare nodded.

Fixx thought about it. In one way she’d come to the right person, and not just because he had a bit of a thing going with LizAlec. Fixx knew all about Planetside. It was where he’d got thrown out of five years before, after he got emotionally too close to a full-Turing AI. Hell, he still owned an apartment there. In Chrysler. Seven vast rooms of art deco steel grown from a cross between Corbusier Lite and Mannerheim. He just couldn’t afford to live in them, even if he’d been allowed.