reMix

Chapter Eighteen Christ on Crutches

The ship stank. The kind of stink you get if you put twenty flea-bitten goats in a stainless-steel pen and then tie them down with neoprene mesh so they can’t float away in free fall. Why even the Family would want to ship animals from Planetside to Seattle, fuck alone knew. But as to why they didn’t take the Kobe option and put the goats in suspended animation, LizAlec knew that. The brotherhood didn’t believe in recreational drugs, nanotechnology or extopian solutions and who was she to question the word of God?

LizAlec smiled sourly, remembering Fixx’s insistence on an inverse link between IQ and absolute faith. The more you believe the less you think. Not surprisingly, that never got taught at St Lucius, either.

Briefly, LizAlec wondered what kind of crap the amulet-wearing Lars believed in, and then decided she didn’t care enough to find out. She was bored with Lars and his creepy, clanky steel lung, bored with staring at goats, hungry too.

They were in an air vent hung over a hold, that much was obvious. And the hold had been walled off into three pens, two small pens divided between the goats and ten black, bristle-backed pigs. There was also a larger pen for six of the ugliest cows LizAlec had ever seen.

All the animals stank: the pigs less than the cows, surprisingly. At least, it surprised LizAlec, who’d assumed the cows would be the cleanest.

“Less animals, more shit,” Lars told her baldly, and he was right. The leathery-skinned, thin-hipped cows in the pen next door were crusted in their own excrement, huge scabs of dung drying to cake on their hides. Only the pigs still looked vaguely pink. Every hour a woman with wide hips and protruding buttocks stamped into each pen in turn and vacuumed clean the air with a huge hose.

She didn’t look happy with her job, but she never swore, not even when the DustBuster broke one time and spat everything out of the other end again, much like the animals.

“Family,” LizAlec told Lars, who just looked puzzled.

“Yours?” His voice sounded doubtful.

LizAlec grunted with frustration. Being trapped for hours in the hold of a filthy cargo shuttle with some slack-jawed retard had worn her patience so thin it was practically transparent.

No,” LizAlec said abruptly. “Family.” She said it like the retard should know what she was talking about, which she figured he should. “Oh fuck... Forget it.” She crept forward and looked down through an air vent at the goats. She was sure one or two were looking back at her.

They’d started out in a cupboard, locked into a tiny side room by Leon, the combat kid, who only just remembered to click the oxygen/atmosphere on before jumping shuttle and heading back to Fracture. It was Lars who’d prised off the grille to a ventilation shaft in their original hiding place and wriggled up, leaving her trapped and almost crying until frustration slid into skin-slicked fear as LizAlec remembered the bioSemtex worm wrapped away inside her skull. Just how far Lars had to wander before he broke the connection and splattered her brains against the utility-green walls of the tiny cupboard wasn’t something LizAlec liked to think about.

Two hours later, Lars reappeared. Not back down the shaft, but in through the cupboard door to find a hysterical LizAlec crouched behind it, clutching the door handle in a desperate attempt to stop herself floating away, one fist raised to protect herself. She’d tried to punch him anyway, slashing clumsily at his face, but Lars twisted out of reach with a zero-gravity grace LizAlec knew she’d never manage. One chop from Lars to her wrist and she’d let go of the door handle and gone spinning, straight into the cupboard’s opposite wall.

Since then they’d been hiding in a ventilation shaft in the roof of the hold, keeping a safe distance from each other. Ten to eighteen hours was the usual shuttle time and LizAlec reckoned they were now way beyond that. The shuttle should be down, its livestock stashed in quarantine pods outside Seattle, and LizAlec should long since have worked out how to escape the shuttle without being seen, closely followed by discovering how to get that fucking bioSemtex worm out of her head, and finishing off with a call to her mother:

Make that Lady Clare, LizAlec corrected herself. She was looking forward to that bit least of all. But they weren’t in Seattle, they weren’t even in minimal enough gravity to suggest they might be getting close. They just seemed to be hanging around in space doing nothing.

“What’s that noise?” Lars asked suddenly.

“What noise?” All LizAlec could hear was the snuffle of the goats and the steady thud of an oxygen unit that pushed a warm fug past her ear.

“Noise,” Lars insisted, head twisted slightly to one side. With his oversized head, lower canines and protruding jaw, he looked positively simian. One of the three monkeys from the ivory statue that stood on the desk in Lady Clare’s study. The one LizAlec had in mind had its hands clamped over its mouth, except it was LizAlec not Lars who was trying not to throw up her guts from weightlessness.

“Someone,” said Lars and rammed his feet, hands and back against the walls of the vent until he was solid and still. Below them a door clanged open, startling the goats. Only this time it wasn’t the wide-hipped woman with her industrial Hoover, it was a broad man with a greying beard and thin ponytail.

High-sided grey boots stuck him to the metal floor. Suction, thought LizAlec, but she was wrong. They were ReeGravs, magnetic sneakers with a diode on each heel that flashed red just before the man took a step and turned green each time his foot hit the floor. He made a two-part slapping noise as he walked, slip/slop, like the sound of an old man shuffling in slippers.

It wasn’t the goats he was worried about. That much was obvious from the Moby in his hand. A small and neat one, but a Moby just the same. From where she crouched above him, LizAlec could see a spool of micro-thin monofilament wound tight behind the Moby’s sharp electric dart. Taiwanese then, no one else still made harpoon tasers... At least, that was what Fixx had said that afternoon they curled up on his sofa to watch a rerun of Death Patrol.

LizAlec blushed and wrapped her arms tight around her knees, huddling herself. From the Crash&Burn, the hippest b/beat club in le Bastille, to this... She’d go up against the taser if she absolutely had to, but she wouldn’t win. She knew that in advance. Even a street samurai couldn’t take 50,000 volts in the chest and keep standing.

The grey-bearded man looked at the meshed-down goats, glanced round the pen and shrugged. “Nothing here, Brother,” he said into a geek mike slung in front of his face. The ear bead squawked something back and the man nodded, shutting the goat pen behind him.

A clang in the next pen told LizAlec the man was checking there, too. Another clang followed a few seconds later and then he was gone, kicking free of the ground and pulling himself through free fall by grabbing at the red polymer handholds set neatly into the corridor wall.

“They know.” said Lars. The sandrat somersaulted slowly backwards, only just brushing the sides of the vent as he tumbled. Lars liked free fall even better than one-sixth G. He could move upwards and along with only the slightest effort, using splayed fingers as springs to bounce off walls or break his trajectory. Being on the ship was like being back in the tunnels, just easier.

He liked the animals too, dropping through a ventilation grille to pet the goats whenever he thought it was safe. The only thing Lars still wasn’t happy about was having left the ice bucket behind. Ben would never come back if his head unfroze. Or if he did, he’d probably be just stupid or something.

“They know,” Lars said again, prodding LizAlec in the back to get her attention.

“No, they don’t,” said the girl, not bothering to look around. She didn’t know any such thing, but she didn’t want the little freak to see she was worried.

Lars grunted and began to run his hands along the side of a large grille just over his head. The grille blocked him off from a tunnel above and Lars was feeling for screws, rivets, anything he could slide a blade under and snap off. The shuttle was old and its conversion to bulk carrier had been cheap. Most of the new panels were just sheet Duralumin staple-gunned at the edges and sprayed over with liquid polymer. The rest were compressed polycrete. Only the original fixtures were welded and Lars had been busy avoiding those.

“Go somewhere else,” he told LizAlec, pushing his broken blade under the edge of the overhead grille. Flakes of yellowing resin began to build up where he cut into epoxied polycrete. Up and down counted for little in zeroG — not that Lars had given them much attention even back on Luna — but he was squatting with his feet pushing down towards the goats, so maybe the tunnel he was trying to enter counted as up. If only he could break the epoxy...

Pushing the knife deeper into a gap, Lars twisted, feeling one corner of the grille crack free a second or so ahead of his own wrist reaching breaking point. LowG leached calcium from a body faster than it could take it in, even if you swore by Bayer-Rochelle’s complete Traveller’s Deep-Space Pac. And Lars hadn’t even heard of Bayer-Rochelle.

Lars wasn’t sure the narrow tunnel he crouched in counted as an air vent, since all of the hold was full of air. And although the air pushing toward them was warm it didn’t really seem hot enough to count as heating. He’d asked LizAlec what she thought but she hadn’t bothered to answer.

Maybe she didn’t know, thought Lars. Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk to him. Shaking his hair out of his eyes, Lars slid the point of his blade under another corner of the grille and pulled up. Nothing much happened, so Lars went back to worrying the tired epoxy that kept the ceramic mesh in place. Staying put made no sense to him, but then a tunnel with only two ways out made even less. Apart from his own tunnel below the Arrivals Hall, which was different because no one but him knew about it.

The shuttle crew knew about this one, though. How could they not? It hung square and box-like above their heads in the hold. They just didn’t know that Lars and the girl were here, and Lars wasn’t so sure about that, whatever she thought.

“Need to hide,” Lars insisted. The sandrat saw the slight, high scrape of his blade over polycrete as flashes, little purple sparks that vanished when the epoxy finally gave way. That was how Lars knew to move on.

“Move now,” said Lars, prising up the last corner with the edge of the blade and sliding his fingers under the mesh. He wanted to lever the grid away, but his arms weren’t strong enough. The girl could do it, though.

“Help...?” Lars suggested.

“Oh, fuck off, you freak...” LizAlec turned her back on him and got on with fretting about why the shuttle hadn’t begun its descent yet. She was hungry, hungrier than she’d imagined possible: her gut was hollowed out with vomiting. She’d had to crap in sight of Lars, squatting at one end of the air vent while he watched her idly, wondering why she was so angry. And just to finish everything off, cramp was punching waves across her abdomen.

Jude had given her a packet of Coag and also some Tampax, in case LizAlec hadn’t taken the Coag in time to stop her period and LizAlec wasn’t yet sure she had. If she didn’t get to a clean, decent bathroom soon she was going to end up killing the little shit. In fact, only the fact Lars wore that stupid ring stopped her doing it right now.

No, LizAlec caught herself, that wasn’t true. She didn’t have the guts to kill someone. Fixx did and so did her mothers, both of them. At least, thought LizAlec, tilting her head to one side, she’d always assumed Fixx did. The early levels of Fixx Laughs Last had certainly been bloody enough to rate the sim as 18R in the States and get it banned altogether in Britain, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Five weeks it had taken her to find a copy. Even the tomb sites on the Web hadn’t thought it worth including in their Retro Raves. She’d finally picked up a tatty pirate DVD-Rom on Rue Jean-Henri-Fabre, having already practically gutted the Marché Biron in her search. Another little trip out to the flea markets that Lady Clare didn’t know about. That was back last summer when the Azerbaijani virus worked when it was still just something that happened to other people somewhere hot and Islamic.

LizAlec shook her head crossly and watched in surprise as a large pearl flipped over to the wall of the shaft and fragmented like glass. It took LizAlec at least two seconds to realize she was crying and then it didn’t matter any more. Because the door below swung open and five people stamped in, ReeGravs slip/slopping and their soles stuck fast to the floor.

One was the goat woman, only this time she wasn’t holding her Hoover. Beside her, looking sullen, was the short bearded man with the grey ponytail, and behind him was Jesus Christ, or maybe his clone. The central figure was tall, with long raven-dark hair and a close-cropped beard so casual it had to take at least two hours each morning. A brown homespun robe was belted with rope round his middle and fell full-length to the floor. (Which was either pretty remarkable, given it was a zeroG environment, or the hem was weighted in some way with electromagnets.)

Beneath the robe he might have been shod in leather sandals and be defying gravity by will-power alone, but LizAlec guessed he was probably wearing ReeGravs like the rest of them. Flanking him were two women, their T-shirts, jeans and skin all black. Both carried Mobys.

Jesus Christ had to be Californian. Even squinting down at him through a grille, LizAlec could tell that his face was perfect. A thin nose led down to full lips. His brown eyes were deep set and framed by high cheekbones and perfect eyebrows. Of course, it could have been genetic, either natural or engineered, but LizAlec knew it wasn’t. She’d caught enough episodes of Other People’s Faces to recognize the cosmetic genius of Heinsik Jacob when she saw it. And besides, she knew that face...

LizAlec finally accepted what she already knew, that she wasn’t on a cargo shuttle bound for Seattle. The man nodded up towards the grille and it seemed to LizAlec that his eyes penetrated the gloom and looked straight at her.

“Come down,” he ordered, the sternness of his voice undercut with warmth, sincerity even. LizAlec was ripping up the grille almost before Brother Michael had finished speaking and was sliding through the narrow gap. She felt like a little girl caught searching her parents’ room.

“No.” Lars grabbed at her collar but LizAlec was gone, momentum carrying her down to the floor, where she grabbed a rail while trying to wrap Jude’s white cotton scarf round her shaven head.

Both guards moved in to grab her but Brother Michael quickly shook his head, one hand reaching out to take LizAlec’s face, turning it so LizAlec had no option but to stare into eyes as deep as the Big Black. This was the man whose God’s Family party held the balance in Congress. The Web evangelist who’d driven the last President out of the White House for an adultery committed fifteen years before she was even elected.

The man most Bible Belt Americans had believed would be their next President, until he announced he was renouncing the world, its temptations and sins. (He didn’t mention also avoiding the IRS.) Instead he would create an ark in space to take the godly out to the gates of Heaven where they belonged.

Insane and dangerous, was Lady Clare’s judgement: but then it would be, LizAlec decided, looking deep into his brown eyes. She was part of the ungodly that Brother Michael’s family were renouncing.

“Child,” said Brother Michael, letting go her face. “What are you doing here?”

“Following you,” LizAlec said as she wrapped the scarf still tighter round her head. She switched languages effortlessly, her accent obviously not US English but still rich with sincerity and echoes of old money.

Brother Michael smiled. “And the other?” The man looked towards the air vent where Lars still hid.

“He’s with me,” LizAlec said lightly. It was what Fixx said every time he took her to a bar in Bastille. And most times it worked except when fat and balding security men — and they were always both — got difficult about her age, but Fixx tended to avoid clubs where that happened.

“With you?” Brother Michael looked at LizAlec, his brown eyes assessing something. Whatever he was after, he found it, for the man nodded slightly. “So be it... You, come down.”

Lars poked his head uncertainly over the edge of the grille and one of the goats immediately bleated, twisting round to get a better view. Lars smiled, pushing himself out of the vent to land near the goat, petting it back into silence.

“Interesting,” said Brother Michael. His eyes looked at Lars and then at the tied-down animals. “You like my goats?” Lars nodded. The only animals he’d seen close-up before were rats. He liked those too, but the goats were more interesting.

“Good,” said Brother Michael. “You can look after them, it’s time Sister Rachel had a rest.” If the wide-hipped, olive-skinned woman had objections, she didn’t voice them. In fact, LizAlec noticed, no one tried to interrupt when Brother Michael was speaking.

“So you want to follow me?”

LizAlec nodded, violet eyes downcast, face mostly hidden in her cotton scarf. It was time she accepted the shuttle wasn’t going to Seattle. And looking at the tall man with his two bodyguards, LizAlec decided she could take a good guess where they were going — and she was a bit upset about it. It was just that... now didn’t seem like a really good time to say so.

“Well,” said Brother Michael, “if you’re going to follow me I’d better know your name...”

“Que Anchee, Anchee Que,” said LizAlec pulling off her heavy silver bracelet and handing it to the preacher. “My father owns Shanghai First Orbital. See? There’s his mark.” Beside her, Lars’s dark eyes widened with shock, impressed despite himself. But his expression was nothing to that which crossed the impossibly handsome face of Brother Michael as he turned Anchee’s bracelet over in his hand and then pocketed it.