He had one of those wide-open faces and a dog-like innocence in his eyes. He’d throw himself under the hooves of a Black Hundred Cossack if she ordered it and not even know why. And she would do it too, Lady Clare realized with a shudder, she would sacrifice him if she had to.
Rain washed over her, freezing her body. God alone knew what was in the water but she was pretty much certain nanites would be there, tiny and invisible. Not that they could hurt her or the house. She was flesh and blood and nothing but, not a single implant. As for the Hotel Sabatini, the walls were sandstone and the roof was raftered with old oak and covered with dark Brittany slate.
“What’s the hurry?” Lady Clare shouted over her shoulder but could not make out the boy’s muttered answer. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said crossly. “Come here.” She pointed at a spot on the carpet, just inside the room and out of the splashing rain. “Keep your eyes shut if it makes you feel better...”
She wasn’t being fair to him but so what. And anyway, he’d keep his eyes shut, he was the type. Lady Clare shook her head fiercely, drops splashing around her like water from the coat of a spaniel. Lady Clare Fabio smiled and turned to find the boy watching her curiously.
Maybe he wasn’t the type, after all.
“Your coat,” Lady Clare told him, holding out her hand. The cloth was soft, woven in fine wool and lined with Italian silk decorated with baroque flowers, the kind of pattern you found stuccoed to villa walls in Calabria. The boy’s family had money or they’d had it once. The coat’s cut might be military but the quality definitely wasn’t, not even for the guards. It looked one thing, but was really another. Appearance and reality, the hobbled twins. She’d always lived between them both, preferring to hide in the gaps that S3’s demimonde provided.
“So why are you here?” Lady Clare demanded struggling into a small black dress — Dior — one of dozens. Usually she also wore sheer nanopore stockings, not to cover up her skin but just to soft-focus the slight imperfections. But she was out of clean pairs. Actually, she was out of everything except black Dior dresses and matching footwear.
“The Prince Imperial...” The boy stopped and then struggled to start again. Whatever it was he wanted to say, he wasn’t finding saying it easy.
Lady Clare lifted one foot and slipped on a black court shoe. It would be worse than useless within minutes, its wafer-thin leather disintegrated to misshapen rags, but it was what she had...
“Paris,” the boy said hesitantly, approaching the problem from a different direction.
“Paris is falling,” announced Lady Clare, saying the unthinkable for him. “The Third Reich has run out of patience, the press are bored. Half of them have taken a night schooner to England to watch London get washed into the sea. Besides, C3N might have ceramic-cased vids with graphite hard spheres and built-in ComSat capabilities but they’re fuck-all use if lightning storms stop their camerajocks from managing long uploads. If the Reich’s going to take Paris, then it might as well make the push now...”
“Someone gave you the news?” The boy sounded surprised.
“No,” said Lady Clare sadly. “It’s been coming for days.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Passion in Shades
Passion never thought she’d say it — never mind actually mean it — but she’d fuck a dead hyena for an unbroken pair of Raybans. Passion didn’t even want to think about what she’d do for a cold shower...
Desert sun blinded her, turning Passion’s famous sea-green eyes into mere slits that squinted from a sweat-beaded face. Every inch of exposed skin was covered with sunblock factor thirty, but deserts reflected worse than water and still her skin burnt in the Megribian sunlight.
Perspiration trickled down her neck, interfering with the connection to her sub-voc throat bead. It dripped into the vee of her collarbone, then slid beneath the lapels of her filthy combat fatigues.
There was nothing to see and even less to film. But this was the big story, the news of the moment. And where history was happening you’d always find Passion di Orchi, though these days people knew her only by her first name. Passion: the person, the shows, the merchandise.
That was fame. People said her name and everyone knew exactly who they were talking about. Passion smiled, then remembered she was still on cam and pulled a solemn stare. Well, as solemn as she could manage while busy screwing up her eyes against the glare. Unlimited research budget and bleeding-edge tech and CySat still couldn’t come up with a lightweight, sandproof vidcam that could film into bright sunlight without needing fill-in lights. Like she was going to have a power supply in the middle of the desert.
Well, actually she had just that... But like she was going to carry all the equipment? “Yeah, right...” Passion said loud enough for the tiny Aerospatiale 182 to pick up, hesitated too long to run it into a coherent sentence and then swore, long and loud. Now she’d have to start the whole take again from the top. That was the big problem with her retro one-woman-brings-you-the-whole-world routine: everything had to be done in one clean take.
That was, if you didn’t want some arsehole back in the studio to start doing a vocal cut-and-paste, and then before you knew it, you were up on screen with shit coming out of your mouth that you wouldn’t be seen dead saying. No, Passion used a digital copyright lock on all her vidcopy. Try to fuck it over and you wouldn’t see the pix for scattering digital dust. Sure, she had a cast-iron contract, but where the syndication department was concerned the motto was sell first, worry about illegal overdubs later. Passion should know: she was senior president of CySatNY.
If Ishies were the media hookers of life, then Passion was an expensive call girl, high class and gold card only, and that was the way it was going to stay...
“The heat is on...” Passion said seriously. She was standing on a black rock so hot that it reduced the soles of her desert boots to the texture of melted cheese. “But the stand-off continues. Inside the San Lorenzo complex, the auditor-general is still refusing to let naneticists of the UN Pax Force carry out their scheduled laboratory inspection, fuelling rumours that the Church Geneticist is hoarding a ‘dote to the dreaded Azerbaijani virus now destroying Western Europe...” Not to mention most of the Middle East, Passion added under her breath, but she knew her listeners weren’t interested in that.
“So tell me, Commander,” said Passion, turning to a squat man whose bulky heat-controlled NBC combat clothing made him look squatter still. “What do you say to the auditor-general’s claim that the Geneticists have only ever been interested in biotek?”
“Biotek, nanotek, what’s the difference? It’s all dangerous.” The man squinted at where he thought the spinning vidcam would be. “If they’re clean then let us in, show the UN they’ve got nothing to hide. Until then... Well, honey, you know my private opinion.”
The squat man put his arm round Passion’s shoulder and smiled grimly as Passion tried not to flinch. “I think they’re kooks. I don’t care if they’re Christian like us or not. Any raghead who lives underground in a desert and thinks he can bring Jesus back to life has got to be crazy. I think he’s got the ‘dote. Hell, personally I think the bastard probably invented the nanoVirus in the first place. He’s nuts enough.”
The General was working himself up for an attack, Passion realized. Covering his back on camera. Personally, she didn’t believe for a minute that the Geneticists invented the virus any more than that they were hoarding a nanetic antidote. And as for the auditor general, he was about as out-of-control as a teetotal Wall Street broker. If the man had a ‘dote, she’d have heard about it already — because the Geneticists would have been out there licensing it to every State desperate enough to sign on the dotted line.