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  Blue eyes were open and stark behind the soft clear Kevlar. It was way too late to take Ben to a hospital, even if Lars had had credit to pay the fees. Shit happens and then some idiot in a uniform wants you to fill out the forms. That wasn’t the way Ben and Lars worked.

  Reaching into his other pocket, Lars pulled out his molywire knife and did what he’d always promised Ben he’d do, if it came to it. But first he tied Ben off at the neck, just under the other boy’s chin, so the vacuum didn’t get any more of Ben’s blood. Lars didn’t know if that made sense or not, it just seemed like a good idea.

  Ben’s head came away clean, molywire slicing through vertebrae, gristle, veins and arteries. It wasn’t effortless, but it was still a lot easier than Lars was expecting. And when he looked at the severed neck, Lars was proud that the cut was clean, the edges of the jugular and subclavian veins all neatly sheared. Only the voice box was damaged and that wasn’t serious — at least, Lars hoped it wasn’t.

  He wrapped the head tight in cloth cut from Ben’s suit and knotted it at the corners. Not ideal, but Lars figured it would have to do, at least until he could manage something better. Only something better never turned up, so Ben’s head was still wrapped in tattered Kevlar. But these days Lars kept the bundle in an ice bucket, which was what he called the Matsui coldbox he’d lifted from some tourist’s luggage.

  Somewhere at the back of Lars’s mind the inconvenient fact that extops were meant to be kept in liquid nitrogen kept trying to break through: chilled down to something like minus 192. Well, tough. A coldbox had to be better than nothing, didn’t it? And besides, when Lars got money, he was going to book Ben into the best cryo facility that the moon could produce...

  -=*=-

  Lars had known he was at the bottom of the food chain, long before he even knew what a food chain was. When he was five, a fat Russian tourist with heavy fists told Lars that was where he belonged. Back then, Lars had figured it meant he was always going to be the last one in the children’s home to get fed. Which made sense: he always was.

  These days Lars fed himself, which was just as well, as there was no one else to do it. Sixteen was the cut-off point for getting the social; after that you were on your own. When he wasn’t ransacking other people’s luggage, Lars lived in the tunnels. Used to be lots of people lived in the tunnels under Planetside Arrivals, but they’d been hosed out five years before in the last really big clean-up. That was how Lars was able to get himself a space.

  Not that surviving in Planetside was easy. There were airlocks, of course, and not just between Arrivals and the outlying crater cities. Even inside Arrivals the main streets had bomb-mesh security doors, laser-cut steel with recessed titanium deadlocks. But Lars made a point of finding out each week’s codes for the service tunnels, and then trading them for food. People might not want to live in the warrens anymore, but the tunnels still made the best route from A to Z, especially if you didn’t want any of the letters in the middle to know you’d been past. And a lot of low-end LunaWorld kitchen staff didn’t.

  After the big clean-out, most of the old tunnel-dwellers had ended up in Fracture, but then Fracture was 2500 square miles of rock and mud-walled houses thrown up by the CasAdobe virus and they were welcome to it. He’d stick with the five square miles of franchise-heaving, LunaWorld-owned Arrivals Hall.

  In the beginning there was LunaWorld, then Chrysler and finally Fracture. After that, the O’Neills took over. Who needed one-sixth G on the surface when they could have full gravity for nothing in an O’Neill? By the time a minor pressure glitch blew a fifteen-mile crack into the 2500-square-mile ceiling that glass spiders had spun across the crater mouth at what became known as Fracture, five other crater cities had been announced. But Fracture finished the building boom.

  It didn’t matter that an emergency contingent of Microsoft’s code police had stripped out the glitch and clean-coded the pressure program inside twelve hours. It didn’t even matter that if the roof had blown — and there would have been warning — it would have blown up and outwards, not dumped the water baffle directly on the heads of the crater’s inhabitants. All of whom owned pressure suits anyway.

  That wasn’t how the investors, customers and real estate agents saw it. They didn’t see that the water baffle was there to drop radiation down to safe levels, that it was a miracle of equivalence that kept the precious water safely between two vast sheets of glass and roofed in an entire crater. They just saw themselves spending each day looking nervously up at a broken sky. Fracture went out of fashion bigtime.

  But all that was long after LunaWorld was built. Back then, it was the Malays who put the lines of credit in place, Beijing who supplied most of the surface work force. While the Americans provided sandrats and franchise holders to fill the cavernous space of Planetside Arrivals once it was dug into the rock and domed over. It was an old idea, sinking a base into the surface and then roofing it: most of the US Antarctic bases had been built like that for years.

  Lars knew none of this, of course. All he knew was that his great-grandfather had come from New Jersey, freighted out on ready cash and promises of a better life, back in the days when the Moon was still a frontier. Now the frontier had moved out to Mars and until last month LunaWorld was a trailer-park trash substitute for SonyCorp’s new GinzaGold orbital.

  But now there were new flights every day. The Hyatts were full. Bars that hadn’t seen a non-package tourist in thirty years were busy hiring out beds to the highest bidder. Something big was going down: the only problem for Lars was that he didn’t know what. His bunker was too deep for him to be able to splice into a newsfeed, otherwise he’d have wired Ben up permanent, instead of having to find a socket every now and then, when the readout showed Ben’s battery pack was getting low.

  He’d seen something interesting today, though. A scowling Earth kid grabbed from a shocked crowd, a WeGuard killed, guns firing. It was more excitement than Lars had seen in... he didn’t know how long. Since Ben died, probably.

  Patting Ben’s ice bucket affectionately, Lars used its top to cut himself a huge slice of Jarlsburg. The Norwegian cheese was stale, but Lars didn’t mind. It tasted good enough to him. Besides, it was free. He’d lifted if off a cargo hand who’d scooped it from the luggage of some flax-haired Scandinavian refugee.

  In a minute, he’d take a shit behind a pillar in a dead-end tunnel that ran off the downshaft, then he’d come back and wank to the soft glow of a holoporn slab he’d stolen years before. Lars knew each of the girls and all of their moves by heart, but it did for him. That done, he’d probably sleep. It wasn’t a perfect life but it would do.

  All the same, he wished he had a newsfeed...

  Chapter Three

  Still Life (but only just...)

  Passion was back — a new body and a new haircut — miked-up with a subvocal throat bead, standing in the middle of a pile of concrete rubble. It was forty years since she’d given up presenting a show for CySat and only eighteen months since she’d come back on air — syndicated to every major newsfeed.

  She was in Tbilisi now, dressed in combat fatigues, the background carefully chosen to match her stark words. She spoke, as only Passion still could, straight to the vid, no script, no rehearsals, no retakes...

  “Three hundred innocent Georgians, mostly women and small children, caught in the biggest skyscraper crash since the virus escaped.”

  Red hair and the ends of her purple scarf flapping wildly in the January wind, Passion pointed behind her, to where the crushed and broken husk of a snow-covered tenement block stood chopped off like the stump of a rotten tree. Just in case the audience didn’t make an immediate connection, the camera lingered on the half-eaten carcass of a Russian tank, chewed down to its ceramic tracks and surrounded by the now familiar circle of dark grey ash.

  It wasn’t ash, of course. It was what you got left with when a nanetic virus had finished chewing its way through weapons-grade steel. And the tank hadn’t been in front o
f the collapsed building when Passion arrived, any more than the rubble had been arranged in artistic heaps. The tank had been several hundred paces away, kitty-corner to the intersection where it had first started to rot. But Passion wasn’t interested in the small-code stuff, never had been, she was there to present the overall programme in a way it could be understood.

  It had taken gold to get eight suspicious Georgian soldiers to lug the ceramic tracks to the exact position Passion wanted, and the grey residue was soot mixed with flour. Snow had covered the real ash hours before. But Passion wasn’t worried: it was a real tank, really eaten, in front of a ferroconcrete block that had really collapsed, killing real people. She’d just brought the elements together.

  “Bayer-Rochelle, SkB, Imperial Impirical, all are rumoured to be working on a ‘dote. But what if that is not enough? What then? Who knows how much longer this plague will rage? Who knows if it can even be stopped?” Signing off with a long, serious gaze to the camera, Passion clicked her fingers and the tiny Aerospatiale 182 retracted its lens and flew into her hand, from there Passion downloaded the data to her belt, uploaded it to a local low-level ComSat and smiled. One of these days the virus was going to get into her camera, but until then...

  Job done and done well. Twisting her head to ease the tension in her neck, Passion tucked the little camera into a canvas pouch on her belt and palmed a packet of Lucky Strike. Half a morning into the New Year and she’d already blown her resolution, just like always. Zero tar, low carcinogenic content, smart filter — and they still whacked up her health premiums. Still, that was CySat’s problem, and given what the network had to pay out on a hack who insisted on being on site in person, rather than sending in a drone and then doing a voice-over, the cigs probably made little difference.

  Besides, Passion was a full director of CySat nV, not just the US franchise. She held a neoVenetian passport, with full diplomatic immunity, so she could afford to indulge herself.

  Passion flicked open an antique Zippo, inscribed 101st Airborne — Summer of Love. It fired up first time. Passion prided herself on the small touches, and that brass lighter was one of her best. Of course, it needed fuel but Tbilisi had plenty of that, from wooden barrels of crude to bottles of petrol. And not a single functioning 4×4 anywhere in the country.

  Which was why Passion had come down the mountains on a horse, balanced on the spavined back of an eighteen-year-old chestnut nag, which still cost CySat more than a new Seraphim four-track would have done had anyone still been bothering to grow them. Passion knew from neoVenetian intelligence — which took feeds from almost everyone else — that Honda and Ford were both busy trying to finalize code for an all-ceramic vehicle. The problem was, it could be months, maybe even longer, before the all-ceramics hit the market. And until they did, Eastern Europe, the North African littoral and most of Imperial Turkey had reverted to the era of the nag and carriage.

  It wasn’t until you stopped to think how much of the world’s infrastructure relied on steel that the extent of the Azerbaijani catastrophe became obvious. That building behind her went down because it was polycrete thrown up around a standard ferric matrix. Let a nanetic virus reach part of a ferric frame and the building, any building, was eaten up from inside.

  And the big problem — at least, Passion had been told it was the big problem — was that the building looked perfectly healthy until the ferroconcrete crumbled. Small wonder the police were failing to get Tbilisi’s project dwellers to move. Not that there was anywhere for them to go, except out into the ever-falling snow.

  Sighing heavily, Passion ground the butt of her Lucky Strike under one boot heel and reached for a canvas bag. It contained goat’s cheese, rye bread and a flask of real coffee. High-grown Colombian, delivered by CySat’s diplomatic pouch, flown into Tbilisi just before the wind changed and the virus struck.

  The woman chewed an edge off the hard bread while pouring herself half a mug of the hot thick liquid from an antique silver Alessi flask, inhaling the coffee’s rich earth tones over the distinctive sourdough smell of the rye bread. It was too hot to drink but Passion drank it anyway, following it with a second cup.

  Nothing like it... Well, apart from raw sex, crystal meth and the thrill of discovering an unknown painting by Andy Warhol. And sad to admit, even Passion felt she was getting a bit too old for those these days. Too old for the harsh reality of combat reporting as well, if she was honest. All the same, Passion was glad she’d insisted on getting back in front of the camera, even if the little Aerospatiale was hers and CySat had only agreed to the trip because Passion was too senior, too stroppy and too famous to stop. Passion sighed again and began to dribble the dregs of her coffee into the snow at her feet.

  “Miss...” An old man, walrus moustache and creased face, was watching her, a snot-nosed toddler tucked under his arm, struggling silently. Shit... It was obvious what the man wanted: the dregs of Passion’s cup. Passion didn’t know whether to be cross not to have thought of it herself, or ashamed to admit the idea of charity embarrassed her.

  Either way, Passion knew she couldn’t refuse. Not the remains of her coffee or what was left of her rye bread, which was most of it. Handing them over, along with a soft, rancid-smelling goat’s cheese she had been saving for later, she looked into the man’s tired eyes and accepted what she already knew. That however much older than her the hollow-eyed, distraught man looked, he was years, decades, maybe even a century younger than Passion.

  “So hate yourself,” Passion thought bitterly, reaching for her belt. And some days Passion did, but she still did what she was going to do. Pulling the little satellite camera from her pouch, Passion threw the Aerospatiale lightly into the air where it whirred like a mechanical wasp before flying to a preset p.o.v. five paces to the front and right of her.

  Facts were sacred but human interest was the hook. If you were slumped slobbing on a settee in New Jersey it didn’t matter a flying fuck that the virus had started in Uzbekistan as a flawed attempt to stop Chinese tanks in their tracks. In fact, statistically you were unlikely to know what a telimar mechanism was, never mind caring about the fact that the cut-off mechanism had failed in ten per cent of Uzbek-created nanites, forcing them to feed on whatever ferric metal the prevailing wind allowed them to find.

  “And so a military weapon designed to last no longer than twelve hours is spreading westwards towards central Europe, leaving heartbreak in its trail. Heartbreak like the tragedy of this old man whose three dead sons still lie in the rubble behind me...”

  Passion had no idea whether or not that was strictly true. But all the same, there would be a core of reality to it. You only had to look into the man’s grey eyes to see the grief. It wasn’t an easy sight and Passion hoped she’d never get used to it, but somewhere inside herself she was afraid that she already had.

  If there had been a plane out of Tbilisi, she’d have bought it, at whatever cost. But it was three days since Tbilisi airport had been functioning. Like it or not, Passion was trapped on the wrong side of the virus. Word was, the infection would reach Odessa within twelve hours, Paris within five days.

  No one knew if it would reach the US but — like Luna — Congress was in the process of closing down its borders, and setting up a strict sonic-cleansing process for anyone so rich or famous they absolutely couldn’t be turned away. But Passion had a feeling that wasn’t going to work, not least because it was impossible to legislate against the wind or birds and insects. Not that the White House wouldn’t at least try. A heart of gold the President might have, not to mention skin like Teflon, but his brain was pure marshmallow.

  No, Passion was stuck with her camera and a beltful of Louis Napoleon gold dollars. It was time she got used to the idea. Holding out her hand to retrieve her little silver camera, Passion pocketed it and straightened up, walking away without once looking back at the bitter-eyed man and child, or the crumpled building behind her.

  Chapter Four

  Sour Times

&
nbsp; Lars tracked LizAlec from the Arrivals Hall out to the Edge and then topside as the kidnappers buggied out for fifteen miles over the dust wastes of a small sea. The kidnappers had gone topside, Lars had gone under, running the disused service tunnels between Planetside and Fracture. Some habits were too hard to break.

  To get to Planetside’s Edge, he jumped a mail drone when it wasn’t looking, dropping down onto it from a tunnel above. The delivery drone hadn’t liked that. In fact, its opening response had been, “Get off my back now or I’ll fry your balls.” Which wasn’t an idle threat. All mail delivery drones had zap capabilities to discourage pilferers. But, in the end, Lars had argued it into submission. Though from the ease with which the drone gave up, Lars got the feeling it was glad of the company.

  But that was way back. Now he was tubed in with the Big Black all around him, trying to ignore the cold and the lack of oxygen. By pressing his back against one side of the shaft and keeping his legs pushed out straight, Lars could move up the steep bore-hole without too much effort. It didn’t matter that a thin line of monofilament dropped away into the vacuum below — the weight of Ben’s ice bucket wasn’t enough to upset his balance. Luna gravity was a sixth of that on Earth — not that Lars knew what standard gravity felt like, or ever would.

  He’d been conceived, podded and brought up on the moon and it showed in his bones, in the onset of incipient osteoporosis, in the brittleness of their matrices and the pronounced lack of calcium. Lars looked fat-faced because his endocrine system was fucked over by the lack of light, gravity and basic health care. His muscles too were undeveloped by earth standards, but pot-belly or not Lars could still move more gracefully than any tourist. As for climbing, he wasn’t Ratboy for nothing. No vent was too steep, no optix tunnel too cold, dark or low to keep him out.