But she didn’t have a problem with that.

“You flew in?”

The general nodded. “Came in on the back of the storm. Sikorsky, full-stealth mode. Piloted it myself...” He was pleased with himself and tired enough to let it show.

“Which means you can’t get out again,” said Lady Clare, sounding thoughtful.

Both knew it was true. Once inside the viral spread you couldn’t get out again, not safely. There was a three-hour window once you hit the edge of viral airspace. Getting into trouble was never the problem, it was getting out again safely — same as it ever was. The man in front of Lady Clare didn’t look like a risk taker, not to her — more Tao Mo than Kau Tze — and Lady Clare prided herself on her ability to sum up a person’s character with one glance.

Prejudice, LizAlec called it.

The shrug he gave was almost embarrassed. “Getting in was very easy. How I get out depends on you. Actually...” the General shrugged again, “it’s interesting how things happen.”

His voice was so quiet Lady Clare had to strain to hear him over the hammering of rain on glass and wooden window shutters. “You once met the auditor-general,” said the man. “Or so I believe?”

“Volublilis?” Lady Clare nodded. “He was a friend, for a while.”

“A close friend?” The Church of Christ Geneticist might be celibate, but there was no doubting what the General meant.

“Not like that,” said Lady Clare firmly. “We played chess, nothing more.” Without intending to she glanced towards ivory figures laid out on a small table. Even buried under their patina of dust, the carved chess pieces were still obviously of museum quality. Almost everything in her study was.

“A clever man,” said the General. It was meant as a statement, not a question, but Lady Clare nodded anyway. “And an excellent negotiator,” added the General. “You know the UN Pax Force almost stormed San Lorenzo?”

She didn’t. Lady Clare looked so shocked the General almost laughed. “It seems some idiot at the UN decided the Geneticists had developed a ‘dote. Of course, they hadn’t.”

The man didn’t say I had, but he thought it all the same. “They were going to fight their way into the complex...”

“So Volublilis negotiated a third-party inspection,” Lady Clare said. “With someone neutral like the Mufti of M’Dina. Got the Mufti to sign a rock-solid confidentiality clause, with exceptionally punitive financial penalties for disclosure of any information not directly related to the Azerbaijani virus or its ‘dote. The Mufti indemnified the auditor-general, the UN indemnified the Mufti, everyone saved face.”

It was the General’s turn to looked surprised.

“He plays good chess,” said Lady Clare. “And besides, that’s exactly what I’d have done.”

“I know,” said the General. “I’ve been reading up on you.” He dropped his hand back into the poacher-pocket of his trench coat and produced not the hardcopy print of her life that Lady Clare had been half expecting, but a small Kodak tri-D that he put face down on the desk.

Poker, thought Lady Clare. The General was a natural poker player. He thought of it as a strength, but she’d never yet met a man whose strengths couldn’t be turned into a weakness. Lady Clare didn’t give General Que the satisfaction of reaching for the photograph since she guessed he wouldn’t let her look at the Kodak, at least not yet. Never weaken your own hand, went the old motto. Though its corollary was, it’s not necessary when there are always people around to do it for you.

Instead, Lady Clare sat back at her desk and waited. Strange generals didn’t fly halfway round the planet because they wanted to deliver you biscuits. Somehow, somewhere she had something he wanted badly enough to compel him to leave home. And whatever it was, the General believed he had something to offer her in return. With food lining her gut and a litre of spring water now filtering through her overworked kidneys, she could afford to wait. Playing the long term had always been something she was good at, practised too.

The General smiled, sat back in his own chair. His brown eyes, thin lips, even the set of his narrow jaw gave nothing away at all. But Lady Clare didn’t mind: just his being there gave her too much to think about as it was.

What did France have that could interest a Shanghai industrialist? A few ruined cities, a countryside stripped of crops and what little livestock there’d been. The freeways rubble, the ferroconcrete bridges collapsed in on themselves. And by next week, even Paris might not be hers to sell.

“My father ate his boots,” the General said suddenly. “In Tibet, in the middle of a winter that took one of his feet and all of his fingers. He shot men for eating their dead comrades, but he ate his own boots while he still had hands to hold them.”

The man had been looking at her Dumas novels, Lady Clare realized, and had seen the one with its leather cover ripped off. He’d known it for a sign of what it was. In that study she had five oil paintings, including one by Louis David, and a hundred times over in the last week she’d have swapped the lot, even the small Rodin bronze in the corner, for a scrap of bread and a glass of clean water.

She waited, watching him wait too. And then the General leant forward and took the tri-D from her desk. “It’s time we talked,” he said, turning the Kodak over so Lady Clare could finally see it.

LizAlec. Dressed in a white cotton smock and with her hair cropped down to her skull. She was still scowling.

“Two questions,” said the General. “Do you know this girl?”

Lady Clare nodded. “What’s the other question?”

The General shrugged, almost apologetically. “Do you want her back?”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Escape Velocity

Shiori was coming in Moonside to The Arc, so she didn’t get a distant scan of the pod as it screamed Earthwards. And besides, she wasn’t looking for a pod, she was scanning for bodies and all she’d got so far was one, possibly male, very definitely dead.

LizAlec’s pod, however, instantly identified the Shockwave Rider as a functioning cargo shuttle and recoded the pod’s escape trajectory, beginning immediate procedures to bring it back on itself, abandoning the statistically less safe Earth trajectory.

The pod’s semiAI could have used full retro, but it wasn’t going to waste the fuel. Instead it gently began to slow the pod, chattering all the while to a sub-personality of the bioAI installed in the shuttle.

Shiori had started to scan for bodies after she saw the shattered cathedral, which was long before Fixx finally managed to drag himself away from the shuttle’s battered Sony simbox. The cathedral looked like someone had cracked the top off a huge crystal egg and left the jagged shell sticking from a Gaudiesque eggcup.

“Sweet fuck,” was all Shiori said. Then she began to punch keys on a walkWeax stuck to her belt, reading out its data from floating-focus fake Calvin wraprounds, Kwaloon-copies of last year’s model.

No sign of life. Central spindle vacuum sucked.

“Hey,” said a voice, “you didn’t tell me there was going to be no war.” It was inner-city rough, street-smart but not as tough as its owner wanted it to be. The combat kid would get there, though. Anyone who could hotcard a cargo shuttle and only admit after launch that he’d never actually piloted anything bigger than a landskimmer was going to make it, in Fixx’s view. If he didn’t end up dead first.

And if he did end up on ice, Shiori was going to be the one to put him there. Leon and Shiori didn’t like each other. In fact, Shiori hadn’t liked Leon from the moment Fixx and she had stumbled out of the love hotel and found Leon waiting for them, slouched over the rails outside. And she was wasting a lot of Fixx’s time letting him know.