“Fixx wouldn’t,” said LizAlec. “I don’t believe you.” But they both knew she did.

After that, Leon concentrated on getting her pod safely stashed in the back of the cargo bay, making more adjustment to speed and angle than the job needed, until the ship’s semiAI was having to compensate for logistical problems that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

When he’d done all he could to organize the cargo capture, Leon began adjusting the speaker sequence, ripping Voidoid3 white noise from one side of his cabin to the other in a cascade. After a while, even that grew boring.

“There’s a spare balloon suit in that locker behind you,” Leon told LizAlec without looking up from his controls. The suit wasn’t her size and it was none too clean, but that was what Leon had. She was welcome to use his suit if she wanted.

LizAlec didn’t. She didn’t want anything to do with Leon, but she couldn’t stay as she was, dressed in an almost translucent second-skin that was ripped in all the wrong places. “You got a coat?” LizAlec demanded.

Leon shook his head. “T-shirt,” he offered. “In the sack in the corner.” He nodded towards a black bag, etched round with what looked like Togo stripes until LizAlec got close enough to see the holostrips were fake. The lock was uncoded, and the bag opened for her as soon as she knelt over it. A T-shirt in there, all right. What’s more it was clean, and obviously enough it was black.

She took it and she took a pair of black Diesels too, without bothering to ask. It wasn’t like she’d ever expected Fixx to be faithful. Actually, it wasn’t like she’d ever expected much of Fixx, period. But LizAlec still couldn’t help the tears welling up in her eyes.

“How do I get over to The Arc?” she asked Leon, pulling his Diesel jeans up round her narrow hips.

You don’t, thought Leon. Not unless you’ve got a death wish. The boy considered not answering, his fingers over the icon that locked the cargo doors, and then he turned to face her anyway. If he saw the hurt in her eyes, he didn’t let it show.

“You could wait until they get back,” he suggested. “I mean,” he checked the time tattoo on his wrist, “They said they’d be back, like, now.”

“What you mean,” said LizAlec, “is they’re already late.”

Leon nodded.

They’d gone in after her and now she was going in after them, that was fine, LizAlec didn’t have a problem with symmetry. “Can you get me close to the hatch?” LizAlec asked.

Did La Papa shit in the woods?

LizAlec felt the Shockwave Rider lurch slightly, engines humming. Whatever Leon was doing over at a screen, it was bringing the shuttle close into the ring. “I’ll erect a tunnel,” said Leon, “leave the outer lock already open, tie her to that thing’s skin.” He nodded his chin at an on-screen grab of The Arc. The boy could have been talking to himself and for all LizAlec knew, he was.

“Yeah,” he said, turning to her. “I can get you in.” Leon grinned. “But you’d better know what you’re getting into. That bitch was armed and dancing — knife, molyblade, hotkeys, grenades... You don’t tool out with stuff like that if you don’t intend to use it.” Leon’s smile was getting wider by the second.

“You know the first law of salvage?” Leon asked LizAlec.

LizAlec shook her head: of course she didn’t. Thermodynamics, primogeniture, negative capability, yes... Even Salic law. But salvage?

“The first ship on the scene claims the lot.”

Looking at him, LizAlec could almost see Leon try to work out how much The Arc was worth as scrap.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Carthage Burns

“Tell Lazlo I want a meeting...”

Lady Clare was standing in her study, leaning against its vast carved overmantle, swaddled in a vast black coat that had once belonged to Prince Sabatini. She was still frozen to the bone and probably beyond. A black teak Buddha, two wooden doves from a gilded Thai temple carving and a copy of Twenty Years After now burned fitfully in the grate, flames dancing like unwilling ghosts then fading as smoke backed up in the sodden chimney.

Her mahogany chess table and Prince Sabatini’s battered Jacobean stool had already been sacrificed that morning to the ash. Lady Clare would have used just the books, but they refused to burn properly, merely smouldering like badly dried slabs of peat.

So instead she’d started breaking up the Hotel Sabatini’s priceless collection of wooden furniture. Later, if there was a later, history would hold their destruction against her, no doubt along with greater crimes. Not that it mattered now... Money had no value when there was nothing worthwhile to buy. And all Lady Clare really wanted was to stay warm, that and keep up her faltering courage. Because what came next would not be easy.

The General had gone, though Lady Clare didn’t remember where. He’d told her but she’d forgotten: her attention span as brittle as her bird-boned body, which trembled every time it moved. How the half-starved boy standing in front of her managed to stay at attention, Lady Clare didn’t know. She couldn’t have managed it.

It was the same Imperial Guard who’d woken her two days earlier and before that had been waiting for Fixx and her at the shuttle. That was, what...? Lady Clare tried to count back but got lost. It seemed forever ago, but it probably wasn’t really that long.

She had food left and if she were kind...

“Here,” Lady Clare said, pushing one trembling hand into the coat’s pocket. She extracted one of the General’s biscuits. “Eat it slowly.”

The gratitude in his eyes gave way to suspicion. If she had one biscuit, how many others did she have? Maybe she had a houseful of food? Maybe all the Imperial Ministers did...

“I had two left,” Lady Clare told him. “Now I have one.”

She didn’t mention that she was saving her last biscuit for her meeting with Lazlo. That it was her tiny reserve of strength and courage. God help her.

“Tell Count Lazlo I wish to discuss surrender,” said Lady Clare bleakly. “Go now, tell him to meet me at the Tuileries.” She hunched forward, pushing frozen fingers further into her pockets, trying to ignore the chill that slid in through the rotting window frames. Half-decent glazing could have reduced the invading cold to nothing. But it was too late now, and besides, Lady Clare had spent nearly eighteen years restoring the Hotel Sabatini to its original glory, wood sash-windows and all.

If she’d wanted comfort, she’d have lived in a purpose-built total-control complex somewhere like Lille. But she didn’t want comfort. All Lady Clare had ever been after was elegance and everyone knew nothing came colder.

The boy was disappointed in her. He’d been expecting Lady Clare to fight, to die: somewhere inside his empty head he’d probably seen himself standing guard over her fallen body as he fought hand-to-hand with Black Cossacks. And now she was ordering a lieutenant of the Garde Impériale to help her betray His Highness.

“Do it,” she told the boy firmly, some of the old fire coming back into her voice. If the flame didn’t reach her eyes that didn’t matter, he was looking at the floor anyway. Saluting coldly, the boy stamped out of the room and slammed the study door behind him. Lady Clare smiled: that was probably going to be the one truly defiant gesture of his short life, poor child.

It was time to see Count Lazlo. On her way out of the study Lady Clare paused at a marble-topped table to pick up a tiny model of a cavalry sabre that rested on top of a pile of damp papers. Hand-written data she’d calmly ignored ever since it had arrived a week before. At a certain point of catastrophe, additional information no longer made a difference. Memoranda become the irrelevance they were. The idea had a certain appeal. Particularly if your job was to leave no traces.