Sighing heavily, Passion ground the butt of her Lucky Strike under one boot heel and reached for a canvas bag. It contained goat’s cheese, rye bread and a flask of real coffee. High-grown Colombian, delivered by CySat’s diplomatic pouch, flown into Tbilisi just before the wind changed and the virus struck.
The woman chewed an edge off the hard bread while pouring herself half a mug of the hot thick liquid from an antique silver Alessi flask, inhaling the coffee’s rich earth tones over the distinctive sourdough smell of the rye bread. It was too hot to drink but Passion drank it anyway, following it with a second cup.
Nothing like it... Well, apart from raw sex, crystal meth and the thrill of discovering an unknown painting by Andy Warhol. And sad to admit, even Passion felt she was getting a bit too old for those these days. Too old for the harsh reality of combat reporting as well, if she was honest. All the same, Passion was glad she’d insisted on getting back in front of the camera, even if the little Aerospatiale was hers and CySat had only agreed to the trip because Passion was too senior, too stroppy and too famous to stop. Passion sighed again and began to dribble the dregs of her coffee into the snow at her feet.
“Miss...” An old man, walrus moustache and creased face, was watching her, a snot-nosed toddler tucked under his arm, struggling silently. Shit... It was obvious what the man wanted: the dregs of Passion’s cup. Passion didn’t know whether to be cross not to have thought of it herself, or ashamed to admit the idea of charity embarrassed her.
Either way, Passion knew she couldn’t refuse. Not the remains of her coffee or what was left of her rye bread, which was most of it. Handing them over, along with a soft, rancid-smelling goat’s cheese she had been saving for later, she looked into the man’s tired eyes and accepted what she already knew. That however much older than her the hollow-eyed, distraught man looked, he was years, decades, maybe even a century younger than Passion.
“So hate yourself,” Passion thought bitterly, reaching for her belt. And some days Passion did, but she still did what she was going to do. Pulling the little satellite camera from her pouch, Passion threw the Aerospatiale lightly into the air where it whirred like a mechanical wasp before flying to a preset p.o.v. five paces to the front and right of her.
Facts were sacred but human interest was the hook. If you were slumped slobbing on a settee in New Jersey it didn’t matter a flying fuck that the virus had started in Uzbekistan as a flawed attempt to stop Chinese tanks in their tracks. In fact, statistically you were unlikely to know what a telimar mechanism was, never mind caring about the fact that the cut-off mechanism had failed in ten per cent of Uzbek-created nanites, forcing them to feed on whatever ferric metal the prevailing wind allowed them to find.
“And so a military weapon designed to last no longer than twelve hours is spreading westwards towards central Europe, leaving heartbreak in its trail. Heartbreak like the tragedy of this old man whose three dead sons still lie in the rubble behind me...”
Passion had no idea whether or not that was strictly true. But all the same, there would be a core of reality to it. You only had to look into the man’s grey eyes to see the grief. It wasn’t an easy sight and Passion hoped she’d never get used to it, but somewhere inside herself she was afraid that she already had.
If there had been a plane out of Tbilisi, she’d have bought it, at whatever cost. But it was three days since Tbilisi airport had been functioning. Like it or not, Passion was trapped on the wrong side of the virus. Word was, the infection would reach Odessa within twelve hours, Paris within five days.
No one knew if it would reach the US but — like Luna — Congress was in the process of closing down its borders, and setting up a strict sonic-cleansing process for anyone so rich or famous they absolutely couldn’t be turned away. But Passion had a feeling that wasn’t going to work, not least because it was impossible to legislate against the wind or birds and insects. Not that the White House wouldn’t at least try. A heart of gold the President might have, not to mention skin like Teflon, but his brain was pure marshmallow.
No, Passion was stuck with her camera and a beltful of Louis Napoleon gold dollars. It was time she got used to the idea. Holding out her hand to retrieve her little silver camera, Passion pocketed it and straightened up, walking away without once looking back at the bitter-eyed man and child, or the crumpled building behind her.
Chapter Four
Sour Times
Lars tracked LizAlec from the Arrivals Hall out to the Edge and then topside as the kidnappers buggied out for fifteen miles over the dust wastes of a small sea. The kidnappers had gone topside, Lars had gone under, running the disused service tunnels between Planetside and Fracture. Some habits were too hard to break.
To get to Planetside’s Edge, he jumped a mail drone when it wasn’t looking, dropping down onto it from a tunnel above. The delivery drone hadn’t liked that. In fact, its opening response had been, “Get off my back now or I’ll fry your balls.” Which wasn’t an idle threat. All mail delivery drones had zap capabilities to discourage pilferers. But, in the end, Lars had argued it into submission. Though from the ease with which the drone gave up, Lars got the feeling it was glad of the company.
But that was way back. Now he was tubed in with the Big Black all around him, trying to ignore the cold and the lack of oxygen. By pressing his back against one side of the shaft and keeping his legs pushed out straight, Lars could move up the steep bore-hole without too much effort. It didn’t matter that a thin line of monofilament dropped away into the vacuum below — the weight of Ben’s ice bucket wasn’t enough to upset his balance. Luna gravity was a sixth of that on Earth — not that Lars knew what standard gravity felt like, or ever would.
He’d been conceived, podded and brought up on the moon and it showed in his bones, in the onset of incipient osteoporosis, in the brittleness of their matrices and the pronounced lack of calcium. Lars looked fat-faced because his endocrine system was fucked over by the lack of light, gravity and basic health care. His muscles too were undeveloped by earth standards, but pot-belly or not Lars could still move more gracefully than any tourist. As for climbing, he wasn’t Ratboy for nothing. No vent was too steep, no optix tunnel too cold, dark or low to keep him out.
All the same, he hated working beyond the Edge. It was off-code as far as Lars was concerned. He was strictly a Planetside creature. It wasn’t just that the off-Edge blackness meant he burnt up precious lightsticks, or even that the fierce cold could strip warmth from a human body as surely as dropping it in liquid nitrogen. It was having to rely on an o/lung.
Even wearing his precious bubble suit, the rough-hewn wall was sharp against his back, where it pressed against black Kevlar mesh. So sharp, Lars felt sure it would snag. But that didn’t make him anxious. What scared him shitless, was the thought of getting his o/lung caught against an outcrop of rock in the darkness, ripping it out of his side to leave a gaping hole.
Sandrats only had one lung. To keep things simple, most sandrats were born with a right lung only, on the left the cavity space was hollow. It was a standard week five foetal modification, carried out when the gecko-sized embryo was still pretty plastic in biotek terms. Partly it was a straight DNA rewrite, but mostly it was microsurgery. You couldn’t put the blood/oxygen exchange in until after the birth, though.
Getting him lunged-up at birth was about the only good thing his Ma had done for Lars. Sure it was a primitive model, thrift-store cheap, a basic oxygen/CO2 swap that took its top-up straight from a metal o/lung strapped to Lars’s left side, but it worked and that meant Lars could roam the airless, lifeless mail tunnels that most lowlives avoided. That was the basis of being a good scavenger, getting to places others couldn’t reach.