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Chapter Seven Ein SchattenKönig

The wolves came down from Scandinavia. Screaming newsfeeds said hunger had driven them in from the wild Asiatic steppes but that was so much cack. There’d been wolves in Hungary and Poland for as long as anyone could remember. Wolves in Latvia and Finland, too. It was only Western Europe that wasn’t used to having beasts that slunk like grey shadows through city streets, scavenging for food. And it wasn’t hunger that drove the largest pack into Paris: it was the Reich moving westwards again, like a black stain across the map.

Wolf skins made excellent rugs, their bristling tails streamed banner-like from the whip aerials of a hundred APVs, and the hepmann shot them down for sport, with delicately balanced Ruger .722s. And by the time the Azerbaijani virus ate out the springs of the APVs and trashed ninety per cent of the Rugers it was already too late. Paris had been under siege for three days and the wolves had reached the Champs Elysees.

It was a seriously bad move, at least for the wolves. The only thing more dangerous than a hungry wolf is a human in need of food but not yet so weak that hunting is out of the question. In the outskirts the wolves were killed with ceramic gutting knives, rocks and sharpened sticks. And in the centre the animals were butchered with the same crude but effective weapons. They were cooked, not as the exotic delicacy wolf had once been, marinated in Meuse vinegar or grilled with wild chanterelle and shredded truffle as Brillat Saveran recommended, but over open fires and in earth pits, from blind necessity, from increasing hunger.

No deliveries could get through from the surrounding countryside, had the storms left any food in the fields. Half the limited-function Drexie-boxes were already virus-eaten. Without regular power for temperature control or maintenance of pressure, the ceramic monoclonal vats were becoming thick with rancid fermenting protein. It was small wonder the wolves didn’t last. Three days without food seems an eternity, until you try five or face the prospect of ten, fifteen...

The urban foxes would go too, following dogs and cats into the mouths of the starving. The rats would also go, but not for a week or more: hunger was not yet strong enough to draw them to the surface. It was a crap time to be human but a much worse time to be an animal. That humans were animal too was not a connection that anyone had yet made. But they would.

It was raining, not the light mid-January drizzle Lady Clare Fabio remembered from childhood, but backed-up sheets of black rain that hammered across the city’s rooftops like waves of sound, battering everything they touched. It crashed like cannon fire, it drum-rolled on the large cracked slates of the Hotel Sabatini like sticks on the skin of a kettle drum, it... Lady Clare didn’t know what the rain sounded like.

Rain, probably.

Hard driving rain had been falling for weeks out of a gunmetal sky so dark each day could have been permanently fixed at dusk. Today’s storm came from the Atlantic, but that wasn’t significant, not now the virus was here. The week before the virus had come in on the wind from Germany, followed by rain that re-drowned the sodden countryside before it hit Paris. There would be no winter crops, nothing useful anyway. And even if there had been, no estate manager — not even Lady Clare’s — would be stupid enough to try to run the Reich’s blockade.

Not that most Parisians wanted fresh food anyway, Lady Clare thought in disgust, at least, not normally. Back before the Reich hired the Black Hundreds to add Western Europe to what Prussia already possessed and the Parisians developed a sudden taste for anything that wasn’t actually rancid, the preferred food texture in the Paris slums had been fried chicken, though ham had been briefly in fashion last summer, except with the Muslims. Lady Clare knew these things. Facts like that passed her desk in digest, amended, annotated memoranda, in lists of supposedly relevant social data. History written as a series of shopping lists.

According to the finest meme-counters the CIA possessed you could define society by analysing what it stuffed down its gullet, not to mention what animals it cried over on Wonderful World, or which plucky downtrodden loser it rooted for in the novelets. Personally Lady Clare didn’t buy that. The only way you ever really found out what your people were thinking was to pull a random selection of them in and gut out their heads, literally. A SQUID could do it and often did.

Which was why Lady Clare was not just aide de camp to the Prince Imperial but also the longest-lasting head of the Third Section, the French Empire’s Directorate of Internal Security. The only bit of government still willing to get its hands dirty in the day-to-day shit of keeping society together. Of course, no one ever put it like that when talking to Lady Clare, but that was how she put it in her own head. She took the shit so that none of it could stick to the Prince Imperial. That was her job: Lady Clare didn’t have a problem with it.

Though sometimes she wondered if any of the other Ministers had the slightest idea of what went on inside her. The black demons, the violent dreams, the whole bubbling cauldron hidden behind her immaculate carapace of effortless manners and Dior make-up.

It was Friday, 12th January, at least she thought it was. The sub-stations for the electricity grid were now so virus-ridden that brown-outs were common and regular power was no longer an option. In fact, as of tomorrow or the day after, it looked like power itself might no longer be an option, unless you had your own virus-free generator, which she didn’t.

The Napoleonic Empire was falling, crumbling around her like cancerous concrete. In theory it still ruled from Schleswig-Holstein in the north to Gibraltar in southern Spain, from the Brittany coast to the borders of Austro-Hungary. But with a good pair of field glasses Lady Clare could have seen all that really remained from where she stood, if only the rain would stop. And she could count on one hand the number of Ministers who still thought it was a good thing. But, worse yet, Lady Clare no longer knew if she was still one of them.

Standing in the rain on the roof of the Hotel Sabatini, her priceless house on the Ile St-Louis, Lady Clare stared down over the inner courtyard to the slate-grey swollen waters of the Seine far below. The river was full to the point of bursting its banks. Only hastily piled sandbags held back the water that threatened to swallow her quiet, impossibly expensive street.

To live on the Ile took a carte blanche. It helped that Lady Clare was a registered noble, with the tax advantages that conferred: helped, too, that she was a Minister. But neither of those priceless social advantages could hold back the water if it decided to spill over the edge of the sandbags onto the cobbled quay. Rain had soaked through Lady Clare’s Dior coat, staining the purple Versace dress below. Her court shoes were ruined, as was the Hermès silk scarf wrapped round her neck. Water ran under the collar of her coat, dripped from black-lacquered fingertips and tumbled from the tiny rat tails of her close-cropped grey hair. But the water running over her cheeks was not rain. Not all of it, anyway.

The head of the French Empire’s most feared Directorate was weeping. Looking out at the grey ribbon of the swollen river, staring blankly at where the vast cross-and-double-helix hologram of the Church Geneticist should have been, if only that arrondissement had power, Lady Clare let burning tears stream down her frozen face. There was no one to see her misery, and why should she care even if there was? God knew, there was enough horror in the city for even the most hardbitten Minister of the Empire to be crying. Even one rumoured to be more brittle than glass and sharper than diamond.

Lady Clare had worked hard to get that reputation. And even if only a quarter of the things whispered about her were true, she’d still be poison to cross. As it was, they were all true, more or less, except one. The one that said Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio was her illegitimate daughter.

It was strange, Lady Clare thought grimly. The Empire was falling, the Prince Imperial was tucked up in bed with a guardsman, the army of the Reich was sitting twenty klicks away, positioned in a deadly circle around the city — and what really worried Lady Clare was the fate of some spoilt, poisonous little fifteen-year-old. A girl she didn’t even like, a girl who, if you’d asked her two weeks ago — Lady Clare was too wet and too cold not to be brutally honest about it — she’d have said she loathed. And now Lady Clare couldn’t get that vile message out of her head.

The briefest clip of LizAlec looking at a camera, a scream and then nothing but static snow. There would be a second part to that message soon enough, there had to be. Some impossible demand that Lady Clare was supposed to meet. No one would kill LizAlec before Lady Clare got the rest of the message.

Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, the kidnappers couldn’t take the risk that Lady Clare might discover LizAlec was already dead. Not that she was any closer to finding out where the original e-vid had come from. Back before the power went down, she’d accessed the SCIS machine in Brussels, called in favours at MIT and CalTek. Had Light&Magic strip away the e-vid’s dropped-in background with its luminous “Free Luna” graffito sprayed onto a glass wall. And at the end of it she was no closer to having an answer.

Hours of precious AI time had been wasted tracking the e-vid, only for Lady Clare to be told by S3’s own machine that the e-vid had been uploaded from her own terminal. The upload and download began and ended at the same terminal, the AI was prepared to guarantee it. Not that the Turing was in a condition to guarantee anything now. All that was back on Monday when the mainframe was still running. Now there wasn’t a system anywhere in the city still functioning, or not fully. Maybe one or two stand-alones might still be virus-free.

Lady Clare shrugged, sodden silk shirt sticking to her hunched shoulders, rain dripping between her small breasts to trickle down the flat expanse of her stomach. Lady Clare didn’t wear a bra: even at sixty she didn’t need it. And as for her gut, it was hard to get fat when you didn’t eat. If anorexia was a disease of the troubled teenage years, then Lady Clare’s adolescence had been infinitely protracted. Lady Clare knew why, always had done if she was honest, it was just that these days she didn’t bother to think about it.

S3’s tame psychologists insisted there was a limit to how long any one person could stay angry with their family. But Lady Clare was already well past her hate-by date. And she needed another gratuitous attack of guilt like she needed her father back from the dead.

She’d intercepted LizAlec’s mail to Fixx, of course. She’d have found the e-vid anyway when she bothered to check the Web traffic held against his name. But within two hours of LizAlec sending it an S3 semi-Turing had pulled LizAlec out of the traffic, juggling packages and breaking crypt to match the girl’s face to a visual template it had been given earlier.

Lady Clare had been shocked, which surprised her. Saddened too, though she’d been getting used to that where LizAlec was concerned. The child looked so young, so terrifyingly defenceless. Sitting there in school uniform in a public vidbooth, over-made-up eyes staring darkly at the camera, white cotton shirt unbuttoned to show small breasts. Part of Lady Clare wanted to know what Fixx would have made of that e-vid had he ever received it.

Maybe it would be worth showing him to find out. As LizAlec was being driven to Charles de Gaulle to catch her shuttle, members of a Third Section snatch squad were already blowing out the steel door to Fixx’s squalid seventh-floor studio in Bastille. The man was safely behind bars before LizAlec’s Boeing had even begun its ascent.

Sending LizAlec back to school had been the right decision, Lady Clare didn’t doubt that for a minute, and she would do it again if necessary. As the old Breton woman who cleaned Lady Clare’s office always said, shit came in threes. And she was right. Take weather from hell, toss in an out-of-control nanetic virus mixed up by some under-age mujahedin and add the black-costumed forces of the Reich, sitting in a circle around Europe’s greatest city like bored vultures.

Clare wanted to blame it all on the Germans... Of course she did, she was French. But her clinically cold intellectual standards wouldn’t let her. She knew the statistics, that was her job. There were nearly as many Frenchmen in that army as there were Prussians, and twice as many Cossacks, come to that. Whichever way you cut the figures, there were three “foreigners’ for every one Prussian.

Elective fascism... And why not Lady Clare thought, head down against the driving rain. We’ve had elective surgery, elective sexuality — what was politics if not elective? The new Reich via Cossack Black Hundreds out of Nazi nostalgia. And who was she to be surprised? If the last century could get nostalgic enough about the little Corsican corporal to allow a Napoleon back on the French throne, who should be shocked that this one got all nostalgic about that little shit corporal from Austro-Hungary?

Section Three existed to ensure the Empire’s stability, though most of what it had done over the last twenty years was soft management. From its base at Les Tourelles, the Pool monitored data, meme-checked and spun news stories along with the best. Which wasn’t to say it couldn’t get down-and-dirty when necessary... And it was necessary now, except that “now” was already too late. Lady Clare had been so busy trying to reach a compromise with the Jihad hackers, she hadn’t realized the Azerbaijani virus might rupture European opinion, spilling out decades of resentment, pulling rioting slum crowds onto provincial streets. La Haine was reborn as a thousand pirate newsfeeds switched allegiance.

Pro-compromise, pro-Jihad news stories were being quoted back at her, twisted. Her own anti-Reich memes, dropped quietly into the electronic cesspit of rumour, were being taken up as Black Hundred boasts and flung back against her. From Montana to Monaco, the same waves of racist paranoia swept the Web.

The Hundreds were no longer just a Ukrainian problem: the Reich was no longer just history. And standing on the rain-slicked tiles of her own roof, watching France’s worst-ever storm rip buildings apart, Lady Clare knew that — at least in part — she was to blame.

Lady Clare made herself look towards the Eiffel Tower then, what was left of it. Millions of tons of steel, billions of rivets, hundreds of years of history eaten away into a brutal metal stump. The virus hadn’t even finished its job, it had just aborted suddenly, switching itself off.

When the virus first struck, it looked like the most lethal side effects might be burnt out. But then the eastern edges of the city had begun to crumble, ferroconcrete projects and slum arcologies falling in on themselves. That was when Lady Clare had tried to arrange for the Prince Imperial to be given asylum in the US, for one last AirFrance Boeing to get permission to land at JFK.

Congress hadn’t liked the idea.

Not that Lady Clare could blame them. What was the Empire State Building but concrete thrown up around a huge steel grid? And as for the famous Flatiron building... At least Paris had some streets made entirely of stone. The Mayor of New York had Columbia run a projection on what would be left of Manhattan if the virus hit. The answer was some rather nice brownstones south of Bleeker Street and a surprising amount of Harlem. It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear.

And he didn’t want the Prince Imperial either. Nor did Los Angeles, Sao Paulo or Bogota. Lady Clare was last year’s model when it came to negotiators, if not the year before that. Washington no longer took her calls: all that remained for her to do was negotiate the surrender of Paris and hope for a civilized exile.

Of course, a week ago the Reich could have bombed the city back into the Stone Age. Or, if they didn’t want to trash a historic centre more than was strictly necessary, they could have limited themselves to taking out most of the inhabitants with a low-grade neutron burst. But that was before their planes started to drop out of the sky.

Now they were going to have to fight their way from the Périphérique right into the Place de la Concorde, street by bloody street.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

At least, it wasn’t going to happen yet. Not if Lady Clare had anything to do with it. She might have fucked up over the Reich, but she was still the person who used the last working Sikorski to fly in as many CySat reporters, Ishies and wannabe warjocks as that ‘copter could carry. Nothing happened in Paris that didn’t go out over the Web, uploaded from a thousand eyecams, fed unedited into newsfeeds, voiced over by kids with dreams of one day anchoring their own syndicated shows. And it wasn’t just the Ishies with their implant modems and in-head wetware cameras who could upload. The professionals were using Cousteau-kit. Rubber-wrapped, shock-resistant, waterproof smartbooks used for diving.

She had every low-level surveillance satellite S3 owned hovering over the city centre, focused in on m/wave and positioned above Notre-Dame, the Tuileries, Sacré-Coeur, l’Arc de Triomphe. Anything that was stone-built and counted as culture.

When it came to moral blackmail, Lady Clare Fabio was in there with the best of them. No one survived that long at the top of the greasy pole without knowing how to keep their balance. And if it wasn’t for bloody Elizabeth Alexandra, Lady Clare’s balance would have been as rock-fucking-solid as those buildings she was using to blackmail the Reich.

It was a simple enough stand-off. The Reich were self-proclaimed guardians of European culture. For which read White, Christian, non-Islamic, Lady Clare thought bitterly. To take Paris by force they’d have to trash some of Europe’s most famous buildings, not to mention risk destroying its priceless art collections.

If the Reich did that, it was going to be caught on camera, guaranteed. The whole world was going to watch General Kukovsy go against his own proclaimed aims. Lady Clare shook her head. It came to something, she decided, when the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo were the only things still holding up the Empire.