reMix

Chapter Eleven Vacuum Sucks

Suction kept the steel plate attached to the wall. It was true that epoxy clips had been gunned to the polycrete blocks at all four corners, but even Lars could see these were powdery with age, shoddily positioned and barely able to cope with the minimal strain of Luna gravity. No, what kept the steel plate stuck to the wall was suction, pure and simple...

Which meant there was atmosphere on the other side of that plate. Not a weak quarter-atmosphere like in the tunnel he was in, but a full half or maybe more. Maybe even the full fucking monty. Hung in a tunnel, feet extended forward and back pressed hard against cold rock, Lars couldn’t name the relevant laws of physics, but he knew from experience the basic rules governing grades of vacuum. Staying alive depended on it. And if there was breathable air on the other side of that gap then he wanted to get through. Where there was good air there was usually power and what Lars needed more than anything right now was somewhere to plug in Ben’s ice bucket. He also needed to find food and recharge the catalyst for his lung, but they came lower down his list of essentials. And to be honest, he could go a lot longer than a couple of weeks with his metabolism turned down to low.

Lars wasn’t letting himself think about the girl, because thinking about her upped his breathing rate and that messed up his metabolism. She was there, though. Every time he touched his fingertips against the metal, he could feel her words, like a low and angry vibration. How that happened, Lars didn’t know and didn’t care.

He had a bigger problem. Lars was suction-side to the plate which meant he’d have to push against the pressure. Even if he could push the plate away from the wall, chances were the escaping atmosphere from the airlock on the other side would slam it straight back, and probably take his hand or fingers with it.

“Right,” said Lars, tugging on Ben’s monofilament line. “Let’s scam you that power...” The icebox came up sweet and easy from the shaft below. Nothing snagged or caught, and Lars didn’t have to clamber back down to help the icebox make the climb. Though the warning diode was still flashing, with a slow and sullen flicker.

“Real soon,” Lars promised. “Just as soon as we get through this...”

In front of him was a hole cut in the side of the tunnel and closed off with a metal plate. Between the black rock of the tunnel and the plate was a single block’s thickness of polycrete. Lars pushed hard against the metal, putting all of his weight behind the effort. Even so, he was shocked when the plate shifted slightly under his feet. It was one thing to promise Ben everything would be all right, quite another for the rusted plate to actually move.

“Shit, man... We’re going do it.” Lars pushed again, hard as he could, and felt the plate slide suddenly sideways.

Baby Blowout. Baby Black.

Whatever was on the other side of that hatch it wasn’t an airlock. Lars could feel a sudden blast of decompression as high atmosphere was sucked through the narrow gap to be swallowed by the partial vacuum of his own tunnel. He was crouched in front of the hatch, hot wind whistling past his head as Lars fought to use his foot to slide the hatch back into place, sealing the air loss.

He thought it was hot air he’d felt but Lars wasn’t too sure: sometimes his feelings and imagination got bad-wired. Mostly he was fine, but just occasionally he’d grab a burger from a stall and instead of it being hot or sweet with ketchup it would taste blue and tingly. Or he’d stop off at a bar out on the Edge to catch NiFlyz Cadillac Jukebox and instead of notes he’d get different tastes.

“Synaesthesia” wasn’t a word Lars knew. But he knew the side effects well enough. Sometimes it was useful, like when he could feel his way up a new rock tunnel by listening to the notes of its surface, watching for the dark tones that indicated danger. Other times it just fucked up his head.

When that happened he’d go surface at Planetside Arrivals and steal a strip of ParaDerm from the shop with the green neon cross in its window. Lars had a thing for ParaDerm. Two stopped his headache, four made him feel warm and eight kicked him into sleep without dreams. Eight was good.

“This time,” said Lars and pushed hard with his foot, dislodging the plate further, wind howling past him so hard it almost blew him down the tunnel like shit off a shovel. Flipping round, Lars jammed his fingers through the hatch and gripped the edge of the plate, trying to shift it. Grit hammered against the mask of his suit and, as Lars tried to ram his shoulders in through the newly opened gap, something soft slammed into the other side of the wall, smashing into his head and partly sealing the gap.

“Shi—” Scrabbling frantically, fingers clawing at laser-cut rock, half stunned, Lars only just kept his balance as colours exploded in front of his eyes, like opening flowers. It took Lars a fraction of a second to realize that the flowers were pain. And when he came to — another fraction of a second after that — he was crouched back in the access shaft, back pushed hard against cold rock, facing the blast of air. His face mask was powdery with ice crystals or dust.

Lars turned, the way a baby turns in the womb, but infinitely faster, with snake-like fluidity. Shuffling his shoulders and hips, bending his thick legs under him until his head was pushed into the narrow opening, Lars flexed his legs hard against the stone shaft behind him and shoved himself forwards, his hands digging into warm flesh.

Not scavenger fat but soft, rich with spare muscle. Fed. Lars couldn’t imagine what it was like to have someone just give you food. But this one, she probably couldn’t imagine what it was like to scavenge.

On the other side of the wall, LizAlec was screaming, Lars could feel it through his fingertips. Not that he blamed her. If someone had been trying to burrow their hands through his stomach while suction from a blow-out held him flat against a rough wall — hell, he’d have been screaming too.

Hands palm-on to the wall, Earth-strong muscles pushing her aching torso away from the wall, knees ripped raw and bloody, LizAlec fought to unglue her gut from the deadly suction. It wasn’t until she felt her body peel free from the hole that she even consciously became aware of Lars fighting past her as the boy slithered swiftly into her tiny cell, one shoulder casually dislocated to let him fit through the gap.

As Lars tumbled onto the ground, LizAlec’s cell went from minor decompression back up to a baby blowout, grit being sucked clean off the floor as precious atmosphere howled under the door like air dragged the wrong way down an organ pipe only to be swallowed through the ravenous hatch. It was time to put the cork back in the monkey.

“Help me,” Lars shouted desperately, struggling with the plate as the girl stood there letting heat and oxygen bleed away around her. “Fucking help me,” Lars shouted, grabbing her shoulder, then ducked as she swung wildly in his direction, wide-eyed with horror, breath streaming from her lungs in a long scream. The girl was blind in the dark, Lars realized with shock. She couldn’t see him. Couldn’t hear him either come to that.

“Here,” said Lars, ripping aside his bubble mask. He grabbed her wrist, dragging LizAlec’s fingers towards the floor. Lars had no doubts she was stronger than him: how could she be otherwise when she’d only recently left Earth gravity? He was smarter though, Lars decided. Otherwise she’d have already plugged the gap on her own.

LizAlec touched the steel plate, felt the strange hand grip her wrist and guessed what she was meant to do. Lifting the plate waist high, she stalled to position it clumsily over the open hatch. But Lars had other ideas, ones that didn’t involve LizAlec losing all her fingers.

Pulling the raised plate out of her hands, Lars threw it hard at the wall and saw the baby black half catch the hatch and hold it. He couldn’t have hacked lifting the plate by himself, his legs weren’t strong enough, but once it was up off the ground he could manage the rest.

A tiny gap still bled away atmosphere, but it was nothing to the swallowing emptiness of before. Pulling the girl over towards the wall, Lars tried to get her to help him slide the plate shut, but she jerked away from him and tripped, crashing to her knees.

“Jesus fuck.” Lars left her there — shuddering with cold and fear — and grabbed a folded square of paper from the ground, wrapped this round one shaking hand and pushed the steel square back into place himself.

Instant silence broken only by a siren somewhere in the background, its wail rising and falling like the howl of a distant ghost. In total, from when Lars and LizAlec simultaneously — but unknown to each other — began trying to removing the plate, to LizAlec finally sliding it back in place was maybe thirty-five seconds. Thirty-five seconds of oxygen and heat being bled away into a partial vacuum.

It wasn’t a Big Black, thirteen seconds of which killed you as surely as a bullet to the head, but it felt like one, at least it did to Lars. LizAlec didn’t seem to be feeling anything. She’d toppled sideways and was curled up in the dirt, choking, her mouth open like a dying fish as desperate gulps of air going down met vomit coming back up.

“Oh, fuck it.” Lars kicked her lightly in the diaphragm, which did the trick, bubbles of vomit spewing out on to the floor and then air rasping back down her suddenly cleared throat. He used the few seconds it took the girl to get her breath back to take a good look at her.

It was the first time Lars had seen a naked woman, at least a real live one. All the others had been holoporn projections or spread wide with some flashing pay-by-access Web address strung behind their blonde wigs like a dayglo banner. She was less contoured than he’d have expected a woman to be. Smaller breasts, narrower hips, less of her all round. Her nipples were neat, though, puckered and pulled erect by the chill.

It didn’t occur to Lars that the pneumatic porn-babes he lusted after were not just computer-enhanced, they were mostly just not real. Most were vActors, digital flesh pasted over three-dimensional, fully functional raytraced frames. Some were masterpieces of coding, but most were cut-and-paste clones of earlier idoru, updated for changes in taste. Small tails were big again, so were fine all-over pelts and pixie-like ears that folded in on themselves until they looked like vulvas. Furry was massive right now.

This one was way different, and Lars liked the difference. Her skin was smooth and mostly hairless, its shade pink and yellow mixed in with brown, and there were glints of deep red fire in her dark curls. Not that her hair was cropped close like most people’s, instead it just tumbled below the back of her neck. Casual and chaotic.

Lars had no idea a cut like that cost more than Planetside was offering for his arrest, but then neither did LizAlec. She’d just palm-printed the make-over against her mother’s account at Gattopardo.

Stepping over the still-gasping LizAlec, Lars took a quick look at the girl from behind. Her thin body didn’t go in much at the waist and her spine could be seen all the way down her back. Her legs were thin and muscled and she had tight buttocks that made Lars swallow hard just from looking. From behind she looked like Ben.

“What name?” Lars asked LizAlec, touching her lightly on the shoulder. LizAlec jumped and scrambled to her feet, arms outstretched in the darkness to keep him away.

“What name?” Lars demanded again, less patiently. Outside her door two men were now shouting at each other and somewhere down the corridor a siren was still going banshee. It would keep howling until the air pressure came up normal — that was what it was there for.

Beneath its distant electronic wail Lars could hear someone fumbling at a manual lock on the cell door, metal grating against metal as whoever it was tried to use a key. Which meant the power was down in this sector. Bad news for...

Ben.

“Shit... Fucking, fucking shit.” Lars punched himself crossly in the head. How could he forget Ben like that? Ben was still out there, stuck in his ice bucket, hanging from a single strand of monofilament on the wrong side of the metal plate. Lars could only think of two ways of getting him back and he didn’t like the idea of either of them. Although retracing his steps from Planetside was a tad more attractive than trying to prise off that metal plate and having another battle with the Baby Black.

“Fuck it,” Lars said loudly, “fuck it, fucking fuck it...”

“Who are you? What’s happening?” LizAlec’s voice was strung to breaking with fear. Lars’s accent might make him sound to LizAlec like he was talking English through a mouthful of sand, but she understood well enough that he was swearing. And even she could now hear Laughing Boy and Mickey wrestling with the door.

“It’s Ben,” said Lars.

“Ben? Who’s Ben? Did my mother send you?” She stumbled slightly over calling Lady Clare her mother but did it anyway: she couldn’t get used to thinking of the bitch as anything else, not even in her own head.

“Ben’s my friend,” said Lars. “But he’s dead, so I’m looking after him.”

That got LizAlec’s attention. “Dead?”

“I’ve got his head in an ice bucket,” Lars told her, his voice quiet but matter-of-fact as if he didn’t find the idea unusual, which he didn’t. The boy was already watching LizAlec’s heavy cell door, which had just clicked loudly as four deadlocks finally slid back. It was opening now, and Lars could see the barrel of a rifle poking nervously through the slit... Had that door been airtight, the girl would probably be dead, oxygen-starved, lungs ruptured open.

“Down,” Lars whispered, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. And when LizAlec stayed standing, Lars kicked her legs rapidly out from under her in one easy sweep and they fell together, Lars’s face pushed tight into the back of her neck. One of his arms went under her, the other snaked up over her face, finding her mouth.

“Quiet,” Lars hissed.

LizAlec bit down hard on his filthy glove and Lars punched her in the kidneys, feeling breath explode from her body. She tried to whimper but Lars had his hand too firmly over her mouth.

“Do you want to get dead?” Lars whispered.

LizAlec wasn’t sure if Lars meant killed by him or by Laughing Boy or Mickey, whichever one it was had just slowly opened the door. Lars didn’t know either. But she shut up and that was all that mattered. At least, it was all that mattered to him.

There was a quick click just outside the door, as if someone was trying and failing to turn on a light, but LizAlec’s cell stayed as dark as the corridor outside. The whole of the rifle barrel was in the room now, held waist high by a tall man wearing the cartoon face of a mouse. Mouse-face had frozen in the doorway, sweeping his gun in a hesitant arc above Lars’s and LizAlec’s heads.

The man was night-blind too, Lars realized. Maybe it was more common than he thought. Ben had been sightless in the dark, reduced to wearing a strange pair of CK NightRyders taken off a dead WeGuard. The CKs made everything glow red in the dark and go fuzzy at the edges. Lars hated them, they gave him a headache.

“Lady Elizabeth Alexandra?” Mickey’s voice was worried, as well he might be. Getting paid depended on nothing bad happening to the girl, Count Lazlo had been firm about that. When he said nothing, he meant nothing: not just crap that might leave permanent scars or bruises. Nothing. Losing her to a blow-out was not acceptable practice.

Lars kept his hand tight over the girl’s mouth, leaving her enough space to breath through her nose, nothing more.

“Lady Elizabeth?”

Silence.

“She’s not answering,” the tall man said sullenly.

Lying face down with some stranger’s hand covering her face, LizAlec forced herself to stop panicking and begin to listen. It was Mickey and he was standing in the blackness above her talking into a button mike. He had to be, since Laughing Boy obviously wasn’t with him.

“Yeah, right...” There was a hiss of static and then the man mumbled agreement to something else. “Yeah, all we fucking need,” the man said tiredly. “You go get a lamp and I’ll check the floor. No... I didn’t know this fucking cell was one skin deep to a vacuum.”

He sighed, drumming his fingers against the zytel stock of his Browning. “Yeah, you’re right. What’s left of her probably is gumming tight a pressure leak.” He sighed again, heavily. “Right, yeah. The Boss is going to fucking love this.”

Lars saw Mickey lower the rifle until its barrel pointed towards the floor and then sweep it backwards and forwards in front of him like a blind man with a stick. Mickey was searching for the girl’s body, Lars realized, but he wasn’t going to find it. Not if Lars could help it. Keeping his fingers tight over LizAlec’s mouth, Lars rolled them both out of the way and saw Mickey suddenly freeze at the slight noise, head turned to one side to hear better, eyes flicking snake-like but useless in the dark.

“Don’t move,” Mickey ordered. “Don’t even think of it.” He had the rifle up now, waist high again, sweeping the small cell. Not that he could risk opening fire on LizAlec, the man had to be professional enough to know the odds were shit. If the Browning was on ceramic then the frag splinters would probably rip him apart too. And if the rifle was switched to pulse... Well, he could risk it but he didn’t know which wall bled to the vacuum. Given it wasn’t the one with the door in it behind him, he had a one in three chance of getting it wrong.

Party time.

Lars rolled off the girl, hearing her drag in a breath as he pulled his trapped arm roughly from under her, fingers brushing swiftly across one bare breast. Lars’s grin lasted just as long as it took LizAlec to scramble to her feet. More than anything, Lars wanted to shout at LizAlec to get out of Mickey’s way, but he didn’t dare give away his own position low on the floor. Instead he watched helplessly as the sweeping gun touched her side and LizAlec gasped.

“That you?” Relief was written through Mickey’s voice. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” LizAlec said slowly, straightening up. “I’m still here.” LizAlec touched a hand to her ribs and winced. She tried to wipe grit from her dirt-encrusted face but had to give up. Her fingers were so battered from fighting the vacuum she couldn’t manage it. LizAlec didn’t know which bit of her hurt the most.

“What happened?” Mickey asked, his question halfway between suspicion and concern. He was reaching forward to touch LizAlec when Lars came up off the floor behind Mickey, wrapping a short length of monofilament around the man’s throat, not fixed with a running knot or toggled at the end like a proper garrotte, just fast and tight with the ends wrapped round his own bare hands. Mickey froze, fixed on the edge of panic.

Then combat reflexes cut in as his right fist swept up and back to punch Lars in the face.

Lars grunted but by then Mickey was already gripping his right fist in his left hand and swinging down to drive his elbow hard back into Lars’s chest, shattering three ribs. Purples and blacks exploded as the boy dropped his monofilament in shock. Lars saw the man pivot and kick, fresh colours blossoming as the blow caught Lars’s shoulder, ripping his upper arm from its joint. Without even thinking about it, the boy hurled himself into the wall, slamming the bone back into its socket. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind.

Ducking away from a second kick, Lars rolled backwards in the dark and grabbed his dropped length of monofilament. A yard of molywire would have had the man’s head off but Lars had only heard of moly garrottes, he’d never actually used one himself. Looping the monofilament quickly round Mickey’s foot, Lars scrambled to his feet and yanked upwards, lifting the man’s leg out in front of him. Quick as sin, Lars swivelled sideways and stamped hard into the man’s exposed groin without letting go of the monofilament.

Mickey screamed.

Stupid, Lars told himself as the sweating, gasping guard staggered backwards, bouncing into a wall. Stupid. He should have taken out the man’s knee, put him on the ground permanently. Hauling high his length of wire, the boy swivelled again. This time, hearing the crunch of a foot pivoting on grit, Mickey dropped his hands to his groin, cupping his balls. Pure instinct.

It was all Lars needed. Slamming his heel into the man’s kneecap, Lars ruptured the guard’s synovial capsule, shredding cartilage and dislocating one knee. One was enough. Mickey went down with a gasp of pain and never got up again.

Razor-sharp incisors went with the Sandrat genes: it was part of the package. That, and two prominent lower canines that gave the Ratboys their name. It didn’t matter to Lars that these were originally gene-coded in to allow tunnellers to tear hard rations, back in the days when payloads were expensive, water even rarer than it was now and clone protein came in dried strips, like some whitecoat version of biltong.

Lars used his teeth only when fighting, and then only when desperate. Like now. The first taste he got when he bit into the man’s neck was sweat, followed quickly by a darker taste as Lars’s mouth filled with warm blood.

Mickey shat himself, bowels opening and a fetid stink filling the tiny cell as surely as the guard’s unearthly scream. It was instinct that made Lars hook one yellow canine behind a jugular and rip, incisors chewing at the hot rubbery tube.

Fingers thrust in through Lars’s eyes would have stopped the boy in his tracks, but the man was beyond saving, combat training drowned by panic. Frantically, he pushed one hand up to catch Lars’s chin — and Mickey ended up helping rip out his own throat as Lars pulled away to avoid Mickey’s clutching fingers and tore open the vein as he did.

There was a larger vein somewhere, sunk under thick muscle, and Lars bent his head to find it, chewing raw flesh as he worried his way into the man’s open throat. The vein was where Ben had said he’d find it, but biting it open wasn’t necessary. The struggling man was almost dead, limbs twitching weakly, his screams swallowed down to low animal-like gurgles of pure horror. Lars rolled off the man and spat, already hunkering back on his heels.

The tiny cell stank of shit and blood.

Over in the corner the girl sat, wide-eyed and moaning, her tightly pulled-up knees wrapped protectively in her own bare arms. Lars shrugged. She was alive and one kidnapper was already dead. He didn’t see what the problem was. That looked like a good result to him.

“Shut it,” Lars told her. “I want to listen...” And when she didn’t, he pushed himself noisily to his feet. LizAlec was silent before he’d taken two paces so instead Lars went to fetch the rifle.

“Browning,” it said on one side, not that Lars could read it. “Pulse/R model 3.H. Factored under licence in IslamBeirut.” There was some other stuff about implied warranties and a DNA-recognition chip was set into the gun’s matt-grey zytel butt, but someone had hot-jumped it and taped a h/ware patch into position. Not that Lars knew that: he just saw a cracked silicon square crudely taped over with grey tamperTell.

Pointing the Browning towards the open door, Lars squeezed the trigger, letting loose a ceramic slug. Muzzle flare lit the cell, and in the echoing crash of that single explosion LizAlec saw Lars for the first time. A fat child dressed in a strange white suit that hung round him like someone else’s flayed skin. Bolted to his hip was a black metal bottle, its hose feeding straight into his chest. His slack-jawed mouth was coated in red. LizAlec saw Mickey too, sprawled dead on the floor, neck ripped open — and then she put the two nightmarish sights together.

“Sweet Jesus,” LizAlec whispered as she backed herself against the wall, crouched low, hands folded even tighter across her knees. Her night-blind eyes had dilated with shock.

“What are you?” LizAlec asked.

“Lars,” said Lars, dropping into a crouch in front of her, rifle cradled in one hand. Part of him was listening to her ragged breathing, watching the way her mouth opened slightly with each little gasp, but most of his mind was tuned to the echoing silence outside. The other guard would come down that corridor, Lars was certain of it. And from the way the corridor had echoed his shot, it was long and straight with no tunnels opening off. Which meant that when the man came it would be down an unlit corridor, straight towards Lars’s waiting gun.

Lars grinnned and allowed himself a sly glance between LizAlec’s pulled-up ankles. He wanted to touch her there for real, see if it felt how it looked, soft and salt. There would be a signature scent to her, Lars knew that, but for the moment all his senses were buried beneath the stink of the guard’s death.

Besides, there would be time enough later and Lars had the advantage, he knew that. The little rich girl was night-blind, while he could see her face, her small breasts where they flattened against her knees and that hungry darkness between her legs. He could watch LizAlec without her knowing he watched, though she sensed he was near. Lars could tell that by the way she twisted her head, trying to follow his movements.

“Lars who?” LizAlec asked finally.

“Just Lars,” Lars said, keeping his gaze on the empty corridor.

“And my mother didn’t send you?”

Lars shook his head, then realized the girl couldn’t see him. “No,” he said. “No, not your mum.”

“Then it was Fixx!” The girl said suddenly, a grin splitting her face. “You work for Fixx!” She was nodding to herself as if it was obvious.

“No,” said Lars. “Not your mum, not Fixx. No one sent me.” He rolled backward in the grit, twisting his legs over his head to pivot on one foot, landing face forward, stretched out, the rifle never even touching the ground. Sandrat style. Even a life as brief as his had its advantages.

He knew the other guard was coming long before Laughing Boy waddled into view. Listening intently to the shuffle of Laughing Boy’s crepe soles on the extruded polycrete of the corridor floor, Lars heard the man move carefully through the dark as he swivelled himself round the far corner, wide hips wobbling as he pushed his bulk against the wall, a pistol of some sort held upright, clutched tight in both hands as he crept forward.

Over one eye was a black lens, fed by optic fibre from a box attached to the side of his head by a flyweight boron-fibre Alice band. The thing looked like an expensive version of the NightRyders Ben used to wear.

Lars flipped sideways in the dirt, rolling out of sight. He’d counted on getting off a clean shot, seeing without being seen, but that wasn’t going to happen.

“Man coming,” Lars told LizAlec. The girl started to ask some question but Lars hushed her into silence. “Don’t move, don’t speak,” he said. He could have told LizAlec that he needed her as his decoy, that battered, dirty and naked she was worth more to him than a free shot. But Lars didn’t have time and besides he didn’t know the words to say it.

So instead he left her there and trusted she wouldn’t do anything stupid, like move. Hunched against the far wall, knees pulled up under her chin and genitals displayed, LizAlec was in Laughing Boy’s direct line of sight through the open door. If Lars had been that guard, then, scream or no scream, he knew exactly where he’d have been looking. Some instincts were hardwired into the psyche: that’s why they were instincts.

Time to get ready. Resting his rifle briefly against the nearest wall, Lars flexed his hands until he heard the bones in his fingers click. Then he swung his head heavily from side to side, trying to release the tension in his neck. According to Ben, rule one of combat was get wired or hang loose, because there was nothing in between. Ben had liked to hang tight but reflex enhancers weren’t Lars’s style. He’d tried ice once, though, but all it did was burn when it hit the back of his throat and give him a headache and a bad case of the shakes. Ben thought it was hilarious, but then Ben thought lots of weird shit was amusing.

No, Lars liked loose; it was cooler for a start. Any shithead could go round radiating psycho but Lars preferred to keep people guessing — is this guy dangerous or not? Is this shit for real? Hefting the Browning up with one hand, Lars swivelled the rifle so its barrel was facing down and took up a position just inside the door. He could hear Laughing Boy’s breathing now, heavy and shallow, on the wrong side of nervous... Mind you, he’d have been brick-shitting if he’d heard a scream like Mickey’s coming over his ear bead. The soft shoe shuffle was right outside LizAlec’s cell door now.

“Lars...?”

“Shut it,” Lars hissed, as quietly as he could. This wasn’t the time to let the guard know there were two of them. In fact there couldn’t have been a worse time for LizAlec to open her mouth — but it was all right. Laughing Boy was too busy dealing with his own fear to be paying proper attention.

And then the guard came in. Beretta held high, barrel up, handle gripped between interlocking fingers, standard stuff. Laughing Boy’s eyes raked to the left, checked that corner and then he kicked back the door, steel hitting ‘crete with a loud clang. Nothing there. His eyes began to flick rapidly across the back wall only to stop, as Lars knew they would, when they reached the naked girl. It was a moment’s hesitation only, but it was all Lars needed.

Stepping quietly out from behind the door frame, he swung the butt of the late Mickey’s Browning hard into the point where neck met jaw. There was a crack as bone fractured and then Laughing Boy crashed screaming to his knees. Pushing the fat man sideways with his foot, Lars aimed his butt at the uppermost vertebra — where skull joined spine — and slammed down, snapping Laughing Boy’s neck. Instant silence.

“Lars?” LizAlec’s voice was high, anxious.

“Still here,” Lars said shortly. He was busy going through Laughing Boy’s jacket pocket. Not that there was much. A cheap Jap inhaler of some kind, pure oxygen probably. Lars didn’t read Nip — or anything else for that matter. Other than that, there was a bubble-pack of derms and a transparent lock-knife with plexiglass handle and zytel blade, the kind of street-punk shit that was meant not to show up on m/wave surveillance cameras and always did.

The nightspex were more interesting. The word “Zeiss” was laser-etched in blue round the edge of the single lens and the autofocus mechanism was undamaged, which was pure luck on Lars’s part. For a brief second, Lars considered letting LizAlec have the spex but then he shook his head. There were advantages to having her remain night-blind. Like, she wasn’t going to be able to see him coming...

As quietly as possible — undoing velcro straps one at a time, rather than ripping them open as he usually did — Lars freed the o/lung bottle from his side and unscrewed its vacuum-proof hose. Dipping one hand into a balloon-suit pocket for the bung, Lars began to undo the front of his balloon suit.

The garment might have been a cheap Korean copy of an outdated NASA model, but it still featured a double seal down the front: the first an outer flap that folded back to reveal two nanetic edges that joined and unjoined as if by magic. Once the suit was off, he’d be able to close off the hole into his ribs, plugging the circular ceramic vent with a replaceable neoprene bung that screwed level with his skin.

Lars shuffled out of the suit as if it was an unwanted skin and stood naked in the blackness of the tiny cell, screwing the plug into his side. Then he got on with doing what he really wanted to do: take a good look at the naked girl. The most obvious difference between himself and LizAlec stuck out in front of him, but there were other, less intrusive differences, and not just that she had neater breasts.

His stomach pushed forward where her gut was flat, and his legs were wasted while hers were still muscled, thicker at the top, getting narrower as they moved down. She still stank, though. In that they were equal.

Briefly, Lars considered dragging the girl out into the passage first, away from the dead bodies, but decided not to bother. He didn’t want to make trouble for himself and besides, she looked glued to the spot.

“Lars?” Her face still searched the darkness, scared and anxious. He’d stopped moving, Lars realized. She’d been tracking him by sound and now there was silence, broken only by the thud of some distant air-scrubber.

“You still here?”

“Yeah,” Lars thought, dropping to a crouch, one hand reaching for the transparent lock-knife. He was still here.

The rape didn’t go the way Lars planned. To start with, yeah, but not by the end, no way... Moving silently in towards LizAlec, Lars squatted near her feet, not yet touching her, his brown eyes hungrily swallowing the sight of her. He was hungry in a way no holoporn made him hunger, frightened too. His whole body shaking as sweat gathered under his arms and trickled thin and hot down his ribs.

Mostly plans just happened in his head, but this time Lars couldn’t suss out where to start: not when he had one knife and a pair of elegant legs to deal with, and only two hands. In the end, he jammed the zytel blade down in the dirt and grabbed LizAlec roughly by the ankles, pulling her towards him so she tipped backwards, and almost split her skull.

“Little fucker!” LizAlec kicked out, the heel of her foot catching Lars on the shoulder, pushing him back onto his bare arse. She kicked again, freeing her other foot, and began to scramble to her feet.

Shock was the first thing Lars felt, then burning anger. His shoulder was numbed down to nothing, flash-frozen by the blow. Still sitting on the ground, he drove his fist into her leg, hard, taking her down. And while she was still protesting, Lars grabbed the knife and held the blade to her throat.

LizAlec froze into utter silence.

“I’m not going to get killed for it,” she said at last.

That was good, Lars nodded to himself in agreement, he didn’t want her dead either. With one hand he reached forward and found a wrist, pushing LizAlec’s arm up above her head. There wasn’t quite room to stretch her out, so Lars let go the wrist and grabbed an ankle instead, jerking her body towards where he was squatting between her legs.

“Okay, okay...” LizAlec shuffled her body away from the wall, her words more irritated than scared.

“Good,” said Lars, not sure if he was talking about the action or her. She was beautiful, he knew that. Blind to the night and not the shape he’d expected, but her brown skin was as smooth as glass and her violet eyes were lit from inside with splinters of fire. And as for her breasts...

Lars drove the knife into the dirt next to LizAlec’s head and reached for a breast, feeling it small and hard beneath his callused fingers. Instinctively, his thumb and finger closed round a nipple and he closed his eyes, tasting its texture, hearing the soft darkness of the puckered circle around it.

Desire exploded in his mind. Not just to taste her, to feel her Earth-hard body crushed beneath his, but to own her totally. To squat forever like a wine-dark memory on the inside of her mind. To hear the full bittersweet symphony of her fear.

Lars sunk his face into her hair and inhaled, nuzzled his mouth below one small breast and bit, tasting sweet blood, ignoring her frantic lurch of protest. Hungrily, Lars uncurled the fingers gripping her nipple and cupped the salt sweetness between her legs, rough fingers curling up through damp hair.

Salt, blood, darkness.

He’d found her.

Found what all the tri-Ds and holoporn couldn’t reveal.

Rape. Pure and simple. No excuses. No mitigation. Not that there ever was for terrorism, murder or rape. LizAlec’s views on that were fixed firm. It came from having an ex-Chief Imperial Prosecutor for a mother.

She couldn’t see Lars but she could hear him, feel and smell him. He stank worse than she did, his fat unwashed body rank with sweat. She could feel him prodding clumsily against her and hear his frantic hunger sour into anger as he missed every time.

LizAlec took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling her heart steady. Ignoring Lars as he tensed above her, LizAlec reached up with one hand and found his face, fingers pushing under the badly cut shock of hair to touch his temple.

Lars stopped his struggle, briefly puzzled by her touch. And then fire exploded like lightning inside his head, knocking him from bright light into deepest empty darkness.

LizAlec smiled.