Genevieve started guiltily and turned. She found herself looking down at a young girl, six or seven years old, with black eyes and an unmistakably flat aristocratic nose. An echo of the girls in the portrait. She was flanked by two kinderbots, one shaped like a rabbit, the other a matt black spider.
"I was looking at this painting," said Genevieve. "My name is Genevieve. What"s yours?"
The girl squinted suspiciously at Genevieve. A red blanket was wound around her waist as a skirt and knotted at the hip; bracelets hung on her ankles and wrists. There was a wiry strength about her. Not an easy kid to handle, thought Genevieve.
"I"m Thandiwe," said the girl. The Baroness"s youngest daughter then. She indicated the kinderbots. "And this is Mr Fact and Mr Fiction."
Personalized education bots, expensive, more expensive still because they were probably augmented to act as bodyguards. Mr Fiction, the rabbit, would be the more dangerous because it was cuddly.
"Pleased to meet you," said Genevieve. She reached out to shake Thandiwe"s hand. Mr Fiction"s glossy brown eyes swivelled to track the movement. The girl shook hands solemnly.
"You belong to Duke Walid," said Thandiwe.
"I"m his concubine. Do you know what that means?"
38.Mr Fiction did a sudden back flip and yelled, "Look at me, look at me!"
Thandiwe giggled. "They think I shouldn"t know but I do," she said. "They get very excited about some things. Watch." She turned to face Mr Fiction, who was bouncing up and down.
"Shampoo!"
Mr Fiction looked stem. "Bad word. I"m going to tell Mama.
You said a rude word."
"Won"t you get into trouble?" asked Genevieve.
Thandiwe shook her head. "This is the best bit. Mr Fact, what is the definition of the word shampoo shampoo?"
The spider scuttled to attention. "Shampoo," it said. Mr Fiction squealed with outrage and brushed his whiskers. "Noun, ancient American, a personal hygiene product designed for human hair.
To shampoo, verb, ancient American " This was too much for Mr Fiction, who turned on Mr Fact and started yelling, "Bad word rude word," over and over again.
Thandiwe stepped away and left the two robots to argue it out.
"How long will they do that for?"
"Until I ask them another question. Silly, isn"t it?"
"Bad word, rude word, naughty word, I"m going to tell Mama."
"Very silly," said Genevieve. She indicated the painting. "Do you know who the other girl is?"
"That"s my Aunty Roz," said Thandiwe. "She was an Adjudicator."
Which explained why she wasn"t listed among the t.i.tled members of the family. As with the Landsknechte and Imperial Bureaucracy, an Adjudicator was required to forswear their family t.i.tle upon joining the order. A supposed hedge against the aristocracy gaining too secure a grip on the levers of power.
Of the services, only the Imperial s.p.a.ce Navy allowed its officers to retain their t.i.tles a reminder of a time when the security of the Empire rested directly on the shoulders of the great families.
An Adjudicator. That was more than she"d found out in a month. "What do you know about your Aunty Roz?" said Genevieve.
39."Not much. She died before I was born. But Mama says I look just like her."
At midnight, Leabie gathered her guests at the edge of the great balcony, looking down into the artificial forest below.
Artificial wasn"t the right word, thought Genevieve. The plants and the birds were as real as any you"d find on Earth. Even the gravity down there was Earth-normal, far cheaper than modifying the creatures.
The guests formed a long line along the edge of the balcony, leaning on the railing with drinks in hand, chattering. Spotlights were moving over the dark canopy of the forest. The Baroness had promised them all a surprise, something she could guarantee they"d never seen before.
Thandiwe had insisted on accompanying Genevieve back to the party. And of course Mr Fact and Mr Fiction had insisted on accompanying Thandiwe. The little girl was something of a celebrity, dukes and barons making a point of chatting with her under the watchful eyes of the kinderbots. Genevieve had caught Leabie watching her youngest daughter, smiling.
The rumour mill had it that little Thandiwe"s Aunty Roz hadn"t died, that this was a cover story for something far more interesting. Something with official scandal attached. There would be people talking about it at the party tonight, carefully out of the earshot of the Baroness herself. Genevieve had heard every imaginable rumour during her research. Perhaps she"d done something dashing, like joining the resistance. Perhaps she"d fled to an outer colony after being busted for tax evasion.
You couldn"t find out from Centcomp. There was a hole in the datascape. The closer you got to Roslyn Sarah Inyathi Forrester, the less you could find out, until right at the centre of the picture there was nothing. Someone had done an incomparable job of erasing all trace of the younger Forrester sister.
Duke Walid, for reasons best known to himself, wanted to find out why.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said Leabie"s voice. She hovered above them on a comfortable AG seat, the spotlights flashing 40 across her in their twisting manoeuvres. "If you"ll direct your attention to the forest below."
There were shapes moving down there, among the trees.
Genevieve leant over the balcony, wishing the spotlights would pick out something and stay with it. Intriguing flashes of motion, something emerging from the forest...
"I"d like to introduce you to the latest microreclamation project of House Forrester. Extinct for almost two millennia."
Whatever those things were, they were big big. A hush was rippling through the crowd, stilling the coughs and the clinking of ice cubes in gla.s.ses.
" Indlovu Indlovu," said Lady Forrester. "The elephant."
"Ooooo," said everyone.
The elephants meandered out of the forest, probably coaxed out by hidden bots. They were oblivious to the crowd high overhead.
They were b.l.o.o.d.y enormous. Quadrupeds, bodies slung low with weight. An extra limb at the front, like a tail. Genevieve could see a baby indlovu indlovu trailing after its mother, a miniaturized version of the adults. trailing after its mother, a miniaturized version of the adults.
"Just to show you we never do anything on the small scale,"
laughed Leabie.
The grand clock struck a chime. Everyone realized it was midnight.
"To absent friends!" called Leabie, raising her gla.s.s. "Wherever they may be."
Among the cheers and the laughter, Genevieve looked across to little Thandiwe, deep in serious conversation with Mr Fact. She wondered how Roz Forrester was celebrating the New Year.
Somewhere, out there.
41.
Part One
Iphigenia
42.
1.
Fury, Aegisthus 2 January 2982
There was a smell to Fury; a familiar smell.
It belonged to too many people and overloading life-support and the chemically tainted drizzle that precipitated from the dome above. It smelt of corruption and poverty and decay and violence, of backstreet deals and backstreet pleasures.
Roz Forrester took a deep breath of it as she stepped out of the civilian transmat on the Piazza Tereshkova. It reminded her of home.
The city crouched under its dome on the airless Zhongjian Plateau, surrounded by the black remnants of spoil heaps and the opencast pits that were visible from orbit. At night they cut non-shadows from the barely visible spectrum of Clytemnestra the failed sun that squatted on Aegisthus"s tidally locked horizon.
Like Kibero, thought Roz, remembering her father using his hands to explain the orbital dynamics of Jupiter"s moons his face as the sun, his fists for Jupiter and Io. Sunrise came when the moon orbited out of the shadow of its primary and into the warmth of her father"s smile. Remembered, too, how an orbit like that made for long days, and longer nights.
Agamemnon, the sun. Clytemnestra, the gas giant. Its moons, Aegisthus, where the military had their base; Orestes, the Ogrons" homeworld, where the pitiful war dragged on; 43 Electra and Iphigenia, empty rocks of no account.
It was noisy daylight when she emerged from the transmat complex and into the piazza. She set off in a random direction, walking briskly to confuse any surveillance. If they were going to take her, it would be right there, outside the transmat, while she was still unarmed and dizzy from the reality shift.
Piazza Tereshkova was an oval of parkland surrounded by corporate architecture going as high as the dome would allow, truncated versions of the towers that sprouted on every civilized world in the Empire. The company logos were picked out in good-quality daylight holograms, in a baroque font style that Roz a.s.sociated with the fifties and the frontier a.s.signments she"d pulled as a novice. Easy enough to put a spy eye or Kirlian sensor on a roof and cover the whole piazza.
Pattern recognition.
a.s.sume that there had to be two thousand plus bodies in the piazza at any one time, way too much information for the smart bit of a sensor to process. It would have to be watching for patterns in the crowd, only keying into an individual that fell outside its parameters of normal behaviour.
Like zigzagging around to flush out any surveillance.
Roz kept on walking in a straight line until she fetched up against a table belonging to a Jeopard tisane bar, one of many that had spilt out over the walkway. She sat down, put her carryall on the chair beside her and shouted for some service. As if she"d planned on coffee all along.
Act like you own the place, sayeth the Doctor.
"I don" sell gun, I sell frock only."
The stall was one of many that stood between the dying oak trees of the Boulevard Gagarin a box of plasticized aluminium with an AG jack on each corner to hold it up. Lingerie was folded into neat stacks on the makeshift counter, the topmost garments unfolded with geometric precision to show silk linings, slashes and isometric triangles of imitation Martian lace. Satin gowns were pinned open like varicoloured b.u.t.terflies against a makeshift plastic backboard.
44.
Bras, garterbelts and bikini briefs hung from rails like a colony of ragged fishnet bats.
"What you want gun for? Pretty human-looking lady like you."
Roz was sweating in the humidity, conscious of the press of the crowd at her back. "Business," she said.
The stallholder was a Qink, a squat non-humanoid, asymmetric and five armed. A stumpy round brain case bobbed on the end of a muscular column protruding from its chest cavity. Grey-green blood vessels crawled over the skull, pulsing to the beat of its ferociously complicated cardiovascular system. Roz knew that a Qink could suck its brain case right back into its chest, where articulated ribs would slam across like a portcullis.
She also knew that the Qink was lying. Qinks always sold guns. Part of their culture, at least according to the refresher courses Roz used to take. Centcomp had called the courses Practical Xenoculture for Adjudicators, but for everyone else it was the Big Bag O" BEMs.
She vaguely remembered something about the juxtaposition of guns and frocks, death and commerce, love and war.
"How about I buy a frock first?" asked Roz.
The pulsing skull bobbed up and down in agreement. Roz haggled and ended up with a thigh-length slip dress in yellow satin. The Qink threw in a pair of matching PVC mules and a gauss microwire pistol. Buying a lace underwired camisole got her a spare clip and a hydrogen-xenon battery pack.
She bundled the lot into her carryall and paid the Qink in redeemable bearer bonds credit notes backed by one of the Doctor"s convenient bank accounts. Technically illegal, such a transaction was OK out here on the rim. But if they headed back towards the core systems she was going to have do something about her ID.
"You good human-looking lady," said the Qink sadly as she walked away. "You shouldn"t be in the death business."
Roz checked the pistol in an alleyway between makeshift walls of laminated gla.s.s fibre. It was designed to fire wire-thin flechettes of depleted uranium. Not a lot of stopping 45 power, but on full auto it could empty the clip of sixty in less than a second.
She put it on safety and wedged it into her waistband and made sure the hem of her jacket covered the bulge. The spare clip went into the jacket pocket. She considered dumping the frock but changed her mind it might come in useful later, even if she was b.u.g.g.e.red if she knew what for.
She bought a pack of Yemayan Strikes and a cheap lighter from a kiosk on the corner where the boulevard met the Via Grissom. She took a moment to shake a cigarette loose and light up. The smoke felt good as she drew it into her lungs. Strikes had been her brand since she"d been a Squire the closest she"d come while travelling with the Doctor had been the Gauloise she"d bought when they were working the Quadrant. Roz exhaled slowly. Now she knew she was back.
Back in the Empire, but the Empire had changed.
Or maybe it was her.
The hotel foyer was a cool s.p.a.ce after the street. Furnished in the early Empire style that Roz had come to a.s.sociate with Fury, large expanses of neutral colours counterpointed with small baroque details.
Two officers, a man and woman, were arguing with the checkin desk. They were dressed in variations of the same baggy fatigues that Roz had seen on the soldiers outside, not Landsknechte or Navy not a uniform she recognized. Roz approached the desk and slapped the service panel.
The female officer turned and glared her pupils the size of pinheads. She and the man wore captain"s insignia on their shoulders above patches that displayed stylized reptile wings.
Pilots, guessed Roz. The woman was narced on something; her companion hovered protectively at her shoulder nervous. A web of fine lines, like cracks in gla.s.s, had been tattooed around his left eye.
"Hey," said the woman. "This place is humans only."
Roz gave her the stare put thirty years of the street into it.
The woman didn"t seem to notice but the man did. He put a restraining hand on his companion"s shoulder.
46."We don"t want any trouble," said the man.
"No," said Roz, "you don"t." The pistol was a cold weight against her spine.
"We got this place staked, see," said the woman. "Four oh three Interface Wing. Our place. Go find yourself somewhere else."