reMix

Chapter Thirty Inside the Gold Mine

“How good of you to come...” The comment wasn’t ironic, the old man really meant it. Though Lady Clare didn’t see how he could. The Prince Imperial was waiting for Lady Clare in his study, six of his other advisers standing around the room. They’d been waiting on her arrival.

“I’m sorry...”

The old man waved her apologies aside. “Dry yourself,” he suggested.

A huge open fire burned in the grate, flames dancing against a carved fireback of Merovingian bees. What had once been a mahogany table burnt fiercely in the flames. What was left of the other legs was sawed into logs and stacked neatly against the wall. The old man didn’t need the fire, she knew that. He might have been born too late to be grown to one of FffC’s patented genetic templates, but he’d still undergone more viral rewirings than most exotics. Which was probably why he’d ended up banning both biotek and elective surgery against the advice of his own ministers. Nothing quite like a reformed junkie for banging on about the virtues of others staying clean.

All the same, Lady Clare was grateful for the warmth of the fire, for the normality of dancing flames; though she knew that, was exactly why the fire was there. For the same reason fresh coffee now sat in a jug on the table and fresh croissants spilled over from a Sevres plate... She knew her history as well as the Prince Imperial. When the Titanic sank a member of the Guggenheim family who’d been wearing an ordinary suit went to change into evening wear, so that he could meet death properly dressed.

Paris wasn’t sinking, it was being drowned. And though God might not be in his heaven and all might not be right with the world, the Prince Imperial would never be impolite enough to point out the fact, at least not in public. His empire was built on such elaborate negations of reality. Most empires were. Augustus Caesar ruled over a republic, at least on paper. The Prince governed an empire without an emperor, on paper and in fact.

The Emperor’s body would be in Switzerland, where it always was. To get into his crypt, sappers from the Fourth Reich would have to cut their way through slabs of titanium-reinforced concrete and then lance open a bombproof cocoon spun from alternate threads of boron mesh, graphite and tungsten alloy, laid at right angles to each other.

They wouldn’t bother. If they ever got past HKS Zurich’s automated defences, the Reich would just kill the juice to the Emperor’s pod. The old bastard wouldn’t know his body was dead, any more than he now knew it was alive. No thoughts could exist in that frozen neural wasteland of his. He’d been all but flatlining up in that satellite for years, the occasional flickers nothing but echoes and feedback...

She was crying without noticing it. Tears tumbled from Lady Clare’s blue eyes to trickle down her tired face. No one in this room had ever known the Emperor, not even the Prince Imperial. The Prince had been a zygote suspended in liquid nitrogen when his father had had a stroke. All his talked-about memories of his beloved male parent were based on relentless watching of old vids.

“My dear...” Sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair, his hands gripping lion’s paws carved from oak, the old man stared at her, waiting. They were all staring into the abyss and the abyss wasn’t so much staring back as reaching out to grip them by the throat. But the Prince at least was keeping his dignity.

Shibui. Notions of personal restraint. It was one thing to espouse the idea in public, which the Prince did particularly when visiting Edo, quite another to suddenly decide you were going to live and die by it. Personally Lady Clare blamed the old man’s long-dead tutor for drumming that crap into him. It wouldn’t be allowed to happen these days, not if her departments had anything to do with it. Her departments... Lady Clare began crying again.

And then stopped dead when she realized just how much entertainment her tears were providing for Count Lazlo. No way was she going to be his amusement. Lady Clare shook her head crossly, a sudden wave of fury putting back the backbone as she pushed one thin knuckle into her own eye sockets. There were men she was prepared to cry in front of, but the newly promoted Minister for External Security wasn’t one of them.

“Gentlemen...” Lazlo looked round at the four ministers standing near the Prince Imperial, then nodded ironically in Lady Clare’s direction. “And Lady Clare, of course...”

Lady Clare just stared back, as coldly as she could manage. Tears were still drying in tracks on her cheeks, her hair was uncombed, unbrushed and unwashed. Only the Dior dress gave her some confidence, that and the ridiculous shoes. Lady Clare looked down at the already disintegrating court shoes and smiled bitterly.

She should have been worrying desperately about the Empire. Except that even the Empire didn’t really get a look in compared with what really filled her head: that she wasn’t able to say a proper goodbye to her daughter. Memories of LizAlec’s face looking sullen and cold flickered through Lady Clare’s mind. All Lady Clare could remember was her daughter’s contemptuous gaze and the rigid straightness of LizAlec’s spine as she stalked towards the departure gate, never once looking back. Not even a silent nod to signal goodbye.

The girl would have cried on the shuttle, Lady Clare knew that. But not at Charles de Gaulle, not in public, not in front of her. Lady Clare was like that, too. Well, she used to be...

“Are you with us?” The words were politeness itself, icily so. Lazlo stood in front of her, offering her a handwritten list of figures. Everyone else already had a set, including the Prince Imperial. Lady Clare looked at Lazlo’s scrawl and knew instantly what it was. A numerical statement of the Third Empire’s military strength. Row after row of figures about the Garde Impériale. That only the Garde Impériale was listed told Lady Clare that Lazlo had no faith in the other regiments holding to their oath of loyalty.

Only one regiment and not a single experienced human commander to lead them. Both the field marshal and the general were dead. Not that they’d had much real experience either, except at listening to their machines.

Maybe this was what war always came down to, a huddle of people taking critical decisions from a position of blind ignorance. There were still a few combatAIs, of course, and JCIT decks, but they were empty shells, nothing more: reduced to muttering in corners, those of them that hadn’t been reduced to dust.

Not one person in the room could handle the necessary equations to fight an efficient war. Probably no one living could, not manually, unaided. And the Black Hundred didn’t need to, they won by strength of numbers. Everyone in the room knew that too.

“It seems to me,” said Lazlo, “that we don’t have much choice.” Tapping the paper with the back of one lacquered nail, he selected figures at random. “Outnumbered four to one... Number of Garde Impériale armed with ceramic rifles, twenty-eight per cent. Number armed with aquatic-issue subsonic assassination weapons, twelve per cent...”

“The rest?” That was the Prince Imperial asking what Lady Clare couldn’t bring herself to ask.

“Unarmed,” said Lazlo. “Our tanks and APVs are so much scrap. There isn’t a functioning battle hover in the entire city. The figures are all there.” Lazlo didn’t bother to add Your Highness or sir. In fact, Clare realized, he hadn’t used the conventional honorific once since the meeting began. Which told her what she wanted to know, but not yet as much as she needed.

“Totally unarmed...?”

Lazlo just looked at her.

“Totally?” Lady Clare kept her voice calm. Repeating her question into the silence, as the others around them stopped talking and began watching instead.

“Glass knives, zytel blades, sharpened sticks...” Count Lazlo’s voice was contemptuous, making it obvious he answered her only out of politeness.

Thin and bird-like, Lady Clare leant forward and Lazlo flinched as she prodded him once over his breastbone. “Even a sharpened stick kills if it’s stuck in the right place.” Lady Clare smiled grimly. “Ask Vlad Tepes... Besides, there must be glass bottles, reserves of petrol, rags...” Lady Clare raised her chin slightly and pushed back her shoulders. So, this wasn’t how she’d intended the confrontation to go. But she wasn’t going to let Lazlo... Lady Clare stopped and caught her thoughts before they span out of control. Just what was she trying to save? That old man sitting smiling at her, the Third Empire itself, or the girl she’d given birth to? No one could protect all three, not even her.

So had she the guts to betray her country or the brains not to have to, Lady Clare asked herself. Maybe she’d have found it easier if LizAlec really had been her daughter — or maybe she wouldn’t. Lady Clare knew exactly why she should save LizAlec, basic responsibility, but she had less than no idea why she should attempt to save a corrupt, rotting empire. Even assuming the Empire could be saved or she could do it.

“How noble that sounds,” Lazlo said lightly. “Fighting the Reich with pointed sticks. But let’s be less emotional about this, shall we?” He stopped, looked around the small study. “I take it everyone agrees our first priority is to protect the Prince Imperial...”

His gaze halted when he reached Lady Clare.

What did he want from her?

Agreement?

“No,” said Lady Clare. “I don’t believe our first duty is to save His Highness.” Even the Prince looked surprised at that: but he kept silent, his pale grey eyes never once leaving her face as she stalked across to a side table, leaving them waiting. Keeping them waiting while she slowly poured herself coffee and then poured another cup, carrying it back to the Prince Imperial, meeting his quizzical smile.

After a life of indulgence, the Prince had been forbidden coffee, cigars and cocaine by his doctors, not to mention sexual activity and stress. But Lady Clare figured caffeine was the least of his vices and, besides, he was about to need all the comfort he could get.

“Our job isn’t to save His Highness,” said Lady Clare. “It’s to save the Empire. And even if we were successful, to save the Empire means condemning Paris.” They all knew she told the truth. Every one of them had seen Gdansk: not a building left standing, not an oak or plane tree that wasn’t uprooted.

Any army could wreak that kind of damage with a small fission device, just as a neutron burst could clear a city but leave its historic buildings untouched. But to destroy Gdansk with gunpowder, crowbars and ropes because the semiAI howitzers were virus-struck and there were no drones to deliver bombs, that took will. The blood-and-iron kind that drunken Cossacks always sang about.

Lady Clare glanced apologetically at the Prince Imperial, but he just stared back, almost as if knew what she was about to ask. “The question,” said Lady Clare, “isn’t can we save the empire, hut should we... Is our Byzantium worth saving?”

Wind rattled the wooden shutters and flames spat in the grate but that was all the noise there was. “We have a choice,” Lady Clare announced into the silence. “A simple, very basic choice. To have any chance of keeping the Empire together we have to fight, with sharpened sticks if that’s what it takes. Alternatively, we surrender now, which saves Paris. But then the Empire falls...” Lady Clare looked at the others, watching their faces. That she didn’t recognize two of them told her all she needed to know about how well the government was holding together. Chief ministers had been fleeing like proverbial rats, their places taken by underlings.

In a way that was good, Lady Clare decided, because it meant the only people who really counted in that room were her and Lazlo. Plus the Prince Imperial, obviously...

“There’s a third alternative,” Lazlo said loudly, much too loudly. Which was interesting in itself. Either the man could feel control slipping away or he was having trouble keeping his temper. Lady Clare couldn’t decide which she considered most unlikely.

“Is there?” asked Lady Clare, interrupting just as Lazlo opened his mouth to speak again.

The tall man flushed. He was leaning forward on the balls of his feet, like an athlete on the starting block, as impatient as any runner. Too fast, Lady Clare thought disapprovingly. You’re going at it too fast. A vein throbbed in his temple and a tic pulled at the corner of one eye. He was under much more pressure than she’d realized. Lady Clare just wondered why she was so certain it wasn’t the same pressure as the rest of them were suffering.

“What’s the third option?” she asked, cutting in again as Count Lazlo opened his mouth. Out of the corner of her eye, Lady Clare could see the Prince Imperial smother a grin.

“The Prince Imperial could rule under the protection of the Fourth Reich...” Lazlo said furiously.

“And for how long?” Lady Clare asked softly. “Until the last of the Ishies ups camp and leaves? Until CySat C3N pull out their final vidman?”

“No,” Lazlo shook his head. “Forever, until...” He fumbled with the words. “For as long as the Prince Imperial wants,” Lazlo finished lamely. He couldn’t very well say until the prince died, because everyone knew the old man didn’t intend to.

“Rule under the Reich? No.” The old man leant forward in his chair so suddenly he slopped coffee into his Sevres saucer, rutting the cup and saucer down carefully, he absent-mindedly dried his hand on the hem of his smoking jacket. “No,” he said more firmly. “I hope everyone agrees that is not an option...” Grey eyes swept the room like intelligent fire and Lady Clare found herself nodding along with everyone except Lazlo.

“Paris fights to the end and maybe, just maybe, the Empire decides to fight back, inspired by our example.” The old man smiled sardonically, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “Or we save the city and...” The prince spread his hands theatrically. He was smiling.

He was fucking good at it, thought Lady Clare, surprised by her own crudity. The old man could have been standing in a ballroom addressing 500 of the Empire’s richest movers and shakers, or talking over a newsfeed to 500,000,000 of his erstwhile subjects. No one listening blind would have known he was talking to five scared councillors.

The Prince Imperial looked at Lazlo and then nodded — but it was to himself. Whatever his decision was, there would be no point trying to argue him out of it. The Bonaparte stubbornness was legendary. He would surrender Paris rather than see it destroyed, decided Lady Clare. The man always had been an old-fashioned liberal at heart: it was one of his worst failings.

“I intend to retire to my study,” said the Prince Imperial, looking straight at Lady Clare. He could have been speaking to her alone and it seemed to Lady Clare that he was. Standing unsteadily, the old man walked shakily across the damp carpet, turning back to the entrance.

“This is not a decision I can make,” he said sadly. “You must decide as you see fit... And when you have, you must let me know your decision.” One ringed hand went up to still Lady Clare’s protest. “You are my advisor, advise me...”

Lady Clare looked at Lazlo and smiled, coldly, pulling images out of her memory. Not of the night they had spent together, disgusting though she’d found that. But of a clone that Lazlo kept hidden at his stone hunting lodge high on the edge of the Lot Valley. The big-boned blonde-haired peasant girl didn’t look like a Kyoko, but she was. Lady Clare had blackmailed Lazlo’s doctor in Cahors to run a DNA scan on the girl’s final double-X pair. It had picked up a Sabine Industries copyright tacked into the chromosome’s sugar-phosphate backbone.

Coding for intelligence she could understand. She’d insisted on that for LizAlec, along with some more unconventional modifications, and coding for beauty, for good health, even for sweetness of disposition, those she could understand, just. But that didn’t stop Lady Clare finding distasteful the idea of gene coding a sexual partner for stupidity.

“Well,” Lady Clare said. “Shall we take that vote?”

They didn’t, of course, not then. Lazlo wanted time to talk to the others, strike deals. Lady Clare knew that and she let him have it. Watching as the tall man moved round the other Ministers, glad-handing newly promoted underlings to whom he wouldn’t have given the nod had he met them in the marble corridors of the Tuileries two months before.

Lady Clare did nothing, except check if the coffee in the silver pot was still warm. It wasn’t, but she drank another cup anyway, without touching a bowl of vast crystals of amber-hued cane sugar from the Prince Imperial’s own estates in St Lucia. Her legs were so tired that all Lady Clare really wanted to do was sit. But anything that showed she might be tired, hung-over and old wasn’t appropriate with Lazlo present. So Lady Clare perched herself on the edge of a side table as if bored by the anxious groups that hung around Count Lazlo.

And while she was sitting being ostentatiously bored, Lady Clare tried to work out in her head exactly what she did want, keeping it personal like her analyst had always told her, until she fired him for repetition. In order, her list ran:

LizAlec back.

Her house undamaged (and with it Paris).

Her job...

The list was both selfish and personal. But Lady Clare didn’t have a problem with that. Global was out and she was learning to think small, or so she told herself. But still, she couldn’t have it all. To save LizAlec meant voting for surrender, the kidnappers’ warning had been unequivocal on that. Vote to fight and LizAlec died — if she wasn’t already dead.

The decision got no easier for being worried at. And Lady Clare was beginning to understand that it wasn’t that her head told her one thing and her heart another: she just didn’t know. Prejudice was the worst possible motive for selecting a side, but stripped down to nothing, which was where she stood, prejudice was all Lady Clare had. That, and a silent, almost unstated belief that if genetics counted for anything then LizAlec was a lot more dangerous and capable than anyone yet realized.

Hard thoughts for a mother to handle, but Lady Clare could and would. If Lazlo was for surrender then she was against it. As for LizAlec... Statistical probability and basic common sense said she was already dead, but Lady Clare couldn’t quite believe it, any more than she quite believed her daughter was still alive. Emotionally she hoped, but intellectually she was agnostic.

Her certainty had gone, hollowed out by hunger, by the loss of LizAlec and by the apparently endless storms. That wind had stripped resolve from her as brutally as it had ripped tiles from the roof of the Hotel Sabatini. Like the city, she was drowning in mud, in debilitating indecision. But she would do what she had to: decide.

“We fight...”

It wasn’t a suggestion: the words were her statement of intent. She still outranked everyone in the study, even if she only outranked Lazlo now by length of service. The decision was hers to take, though open statements weren’t her usual style.

The room stilled.

“We fight,” Lady Clare said fiercely, “because we don’t have any alternative.” Staring round, Lady Clare could tell that the others weren’t convinced, and she wasn’t surprised. Fat, balding or weak, they were even less impressed by the thought of having to get out there and fight than they were by the idea of dying. And she didn’t blame them. In their place she’d have felt the same.

Lazlo would always be beyond reach, but not the others and in memetic terms five was a very small number of minds to colonize. As always, Lady Clare started in hard: forcing unpalatable facts down their throats. Sugar syrup could come later.

“Whatever we do, most people in this room will die.” That got their attention. “Listen,” said Lady Clare. “We’re ministers, sub-ministers, heads of sections. Why would the Reich let any of us live?”

“No, wait...” The woman flipped up her hand to still Lazlo. “You can talk later.” One of the junior ministers smiled and then another. And Lady Clare breathed a tiny sigh of relief. Some of them at least were obviously enjoying the tall minister’s discomfort. She could bring round the others yet, Lady Clare just knew it.

“I want to tell you one of the Prince Imperial’s favourite stories,” announced Lady Clare. “It happened in ancient Greece, or maybe it was Rome...”

“Terrific,” the young finance minister who’d smiled when she put down Lazlo groaned aloud, but his muttered aside was friendly, almost resigned. The Prince Imperial was known for his ability (if ability it was) to draw a classical allusion from any event. There were those, Lazlo among them, who believed the old man knew more about Gallia Lugdunensis, Germania Libra and the Belgae than he did about what went on within the borders of his own empire.

Lady Clare wasn’t fooled and hadn’t been for a long time. Not since the old man had pulled three disparate facts together and suddenly asked her a simple but unanswerable question about the religious situation in M’Dina. That was when she’d realized he hid the mind of a tactician behind the clumsiness of a buffoon. His role model wasn’t the original little Corsican corporal who’d risen from poverty to be the first Napoleon. It was the stuttering Roman emperor Clau-Clau-Claudius.

“A general wanted to storm a city,” said Lady Clare. She kept her words simple. One of the ministers in the room didn’t oven have French as his main language, having been born in France Outre-mer. And besides that, simplicity paid. “But the city walls were high and the gates were strong. For weeks the general besieged the city, without success, until a treacherous slave came to him in the night and offered to open the gates from within in return for gold.”

Lady Clare let her gaze drift slowly across the room to settle on Lazlo: let the others make of that what they would, and they would...

“The general accepted and that night the slave opened a side gate to let the enemy slip in and kill people where they slept. The last person to be murdered was the city’s ruler, his throat cut by the general in front of the king’s slave.”

Lady Clare stopped, just long enough to check that everyone was listening. She had their attention right enough, every scrap of it. Even Lazlo had stopped peering at his nails and pretending to be bored. But then Lazlo knew what happened next, even if the others didn’t. Lady Clare wasn’t the only one to have heard the tale told by the Prince Imperial.

Lazlo could interrupt her now, of course. But that would only make the others all the more anxious to hear what happened. She had him and Lady Clare knew it. Pushing herself way from the table, Lady Clare stood to face them. Her voice dropped an octave, as she tried to sound as much like the Prince Imperial as she could, but most of them never even noticed.

“When the city was taken and the inhabitants dead, the general ordered the slave to the top of the city walls to receive his bag of gold. And then, having given the slave his gold and made him a free man, the general ordered two of his own slaves to toss the traitor to the streets below. Because, as the general told the traitor before he was thrown to his death, if his old master couldn’t trust him, who could?”

“We’re not slaves,” Lazlo said contemptuously.

“Everyone’s a slave to something,” said Lady Clare.

The young finance minister nodded. “Marcus Aurelius.”

Lady Clare gave the man her best half-smile. “The point is, if we fight the Reich they’ll kill us. And if we surrender Paris and give up the Prince Imperial, then they’ll kill us anyway, eventually. They’ll have no choice, we’ll have shown we can’t be trusted...”

She was talking direct to Lazlo now. “...Of course, if you think you can cut a deal for yourself, then go ahead and try. But I imagine any deal depends on delivering not just the city but also His Highness. And I don’t think that’s going to happen, do you?”

He didn’t. She could see the doubt in his green eyes. And behind the doubt, something darker, more malicious, infinitely more personal. That was when Lady Clare finally understood what had happened to LizAlec and why.

Lazlo smiled.

“My daughter is dead.” Lady Clare stated it as a fact. If Lazlo had LizAlec still alive, he’d have let her see tapes, made Lady Clare listen to LizAlec plead. She knew Lazlo, he wouldn’t have been able to resist.

“Oh no,” said the tall minister, stepping in close. “She’s very much alive.” He hoped it was true, not that it mattered. Either way, the woman in front of him didn’t know if it was true or not. “But all it takes is one simple call. And my dashing friends do have one comStation still active, you know.”

It wasn’t true. From Winchester pulse/Rs to satellite dishes, everything had turned out to contain steel somewhere. Even the Reich’s metal-free non-detectable anti-personnel mines turned out to have a tiny hair-thin steel spike right at its heart. carbon-shielded against microwave detection and destruction, but made of metal and virus-vulnerable all the same.

“I don’t believe you,” said Lady Clare. Everyone else was forgotten. All the woman could see in her head, all she could think about was Lazlo and LizAlec. She refused to think about the thing she wanted to think about and then she did anyway. Wondering just how LizAlec had died.

“Don’t you want to know where she is?” Lazlo’s voice stopped Lady Clare as she swept towards the door, head held high, hands grasped tight to prevent them shaking. She turned back, contempt written across her thin, once beautiful face.

“My daughter is dead.”

Lazlo laughed. “Your daughter?” He stretched lazily like a cat and reached for a decanter, pouring cognac into a balloon glass. “Take your time before talking to the Prince. Think things over properly.” His voice was easy and confident — and Lady Clare had never hated someone so much in her life.

“LizAlec is alive?” Lady Clare forced herself to ask the question.

“At the moment.”

“And you know where she is?” Lady Clare met Lazlo’s cold grey eyes, cutting a rapid deal with herself. “Because if you do know where to find her, I think we should talk.”

“Oh yes,” said Lazlo smiling. “I know exactly where to find her.”