Crash Deluxe (27 page)

Mal was waiting, guarded by another knot of agitated security.

I pressed the bottle into the pounding pulse in Bau’s neck.

‘Tell them to get back.’

In seconds they’d withdrawn without her moving a muscle. Either her comm implant was still working or she had a back-up set.

I ran my stare over her.
Where is it?

I dragged her across the tarmac, making sure that her body shielded my most vulnerable parts. The wound in my arm had nearly stopped bleeding but blood and the leftover bits of the guard were pasted all over both of us.

For once I wasn’t concerned about what I might be spreading with my body fluids.

To my mind the Eskaalim symbiote hiding in Bau’s genes was already out of control. Why else would she fund a place like MoVay for ratings?

I pushed her into the ’copter behind the pilot’s seat, climbed in and slammed the door.

Mal lifted off on her pre-planned course without a word. I was growing real fond of the woman. She didn’t know the meaning of the word
flinch
.

I clipped Bau on the side of the head. As she reeled from the blow, I locked her head in the crook of my arm. With a few quick jabs I gouged out her implant. She salivated and frothed at the sensory dep, so I dermed her with the medic’s painkill to keep her conscious.

A mass of airborne lights followed us. Priers, Militia with one of the three insignia pulsing a warning and some private voyeurs jostled for position.

We flew fast and straight into the dawn on the bearing that I’d given Mal. When we passed over the edge of the Viva environs some of the private light aeros dropped away but most of the convoy stayed up close and personal.

I studied Bau’s twitches carefully to see if she was communicating on a back-up. Chances were that it was hard-wired to something vital. I didn’t want anything to happen to her until she saw what she’d created.

Our flight path took us along the coastline between Viva and Jinberra Island. When we left the city, Mal veered slightly south-west, in over the wasteland and Torley’s. Every punter on the north side would have neck-ache from watching the air convoy.

I imagined the rumours and the dread. If the Priers were giving live feed on something approaching the truth, Teece would be crazy with worry.

Me, I’d gone past worry the moment I put a broken bottle to Bau’s throat.

Was this how Loyl felt? Not bulletproof - judgement-proof.

‘What are they showing on LTA?’ I asked.

Mal flicked around the frequencies. ‘The whole net is on us. The Pan-Sat telecast has been delayed.’ She gave the shortest, driest laugh. ‘You think you were famous before . . .’

‘What about you?’

‘Nobody remembers the pilot. Anyway, there’s other things for them to think about.’

She pointed east and west. Behind us a trail of ULs flew like the frill of a bridal veil. Every punter who could get into the ether was up there.

I suddenly had an idea that might save our lives.

Mal’s, anyway.

‘Take us as low and slow as you can. I want everyone in The Tert to see this. And I want all the smaller craft to be able to keep up.’

Bau twitched as if she could read my mind.

I ignored her and pressed my nose to the window. In the soft pink smog-streaks of daybreak, the familiar sickness of MoVay began to unfold. First the sparkling blue strip of copper-poisoned canal. Then the bright colours of the rampant wild tek as it mingled exotically with the jungle strip.

‘Lower.’

The fibre-optic towers had grown, soaring into the sky like bleeding glass fingers. We wove through them and I saw lumps of flesh dotted along their lengths - humans sucked dry of moisture.

‘What is
that
?’ Mal gasped.

I didn’t answer but hauled Bau upright and shook her to consciousness. Her eyes took seconds to focus. Then they showed only confusion.

I put my mouth to her ear and told her a story.

‘Once upon a time a rich and famous woman decided that she needed to destroy her competitors. She hired a bad man named Ike del Morte and told him to go forth and engineer the devolution of the human race. Experiment on the criminals and the poor. Do any number of things to them. Make them as grotesque and as terrifying as you can because I NEED BETTER RATINGS.’

Bau’s eyes cleared slowly with understanding.

I tightened my grip on her and slammed her face against the window.

‘See the ring of buildings?’ I told Mal. ‘Get as low as you can without setting us down.’

Mal nodded. We slowed and descended further, the mass of the airborne flotilla piling around and above us.

I wrenched the door back. Rotor-blade noise and the sweet pungent decay-reek of MoVay air rushed in. Ike’s shop of horrors, set in the centre of the old fuel farm, rippled with a life of its own. Crawl had smothered all the building surfaces like an abandoned furnished room covered with dust sheets. Only these sheets writhed and stank and ate at themselves.

As if it could sense the nearness of fresh, untainted material, it began to froth, spurting crawl into the air.

Or was it only crawl?

Maybe my imagination had gotten beyond wild but I thought I saw human shapes swimming in it.

The shock on Bau’s face told me that maybe she was seeing something as well.

‘Take us just out of the ring of the buildings. I want you to find anything that’s alive and moving down there. When I tell you to, I want you to take me in as close as you can,’ I shouted. ‘And pass me the transceiver jig.’

The Priers owned by Monk and Land hovered in close, camming everything. They were getting in the way of Bau’s Lash Militia, who were getting in the way of Bau’s Priers, who were dodging the ULs.

Chaos.

They couldn’t help themselves.

I’d hoped that would happen. Needed it to, in fact.

‘Mal. What are you tuned into?’

‘CommonNet and OneWorld instream. Say the word and everything else will stop. Half the world is watching you already,’ she shouted back.

I slipped the jig on and pushed Bau to the edge, forcing her to put her legs out. I crawled next to her. We sat side by side like two kids swinging their legs over climbing bars. Except that I was holding jagged glass at her throat and Priers were hanging dangerously close to each other to film us.

‘For the record . . .’ I waited a few seconds before I continued, long enough for on-line word to silence, to catch up. ‘For the record . . . I am Parrish Plessis and this is Sera Bau, Information Owner of DramaNews. I wanted her to see, and you to see, something she is responsible for. This is the Tertiary sector . . .’

And I told my story. The whole thing, beginning to end, in hoarse, desperate tones.

I finished quietly.

‘Two things worry me now . . . that’s all. One of them is that you won’t know if this is real or staged. The other is . . . will you care? I guess I can’t do anything about whether you care but I
can
do something to let you know it is real.’

I motioned to Mal and she took us down within metres of the ruined MoVay rooftops. We flew along the diseased alleyways, alongside bleeding villas until we flushed out some of the remains of life, beastlike and no longer human.

Shape-changers.

I saw again the horror of what I would become, of what we all would. It renewed my absolute conviction.

‘Swing us around.’

Mal managed the manoeuvre, bringing us into a direct line of sight with the peeping Priers.

Without conscience or warning I scrambled back inside and booted Bau squarely in the back.

She fell, grabbing desperately at the ’copter’s struts.

‘Fuck you . . .’ she screamed.

I stamped at her grasping, frantic fingers but she resisted me.

Tearing the jig off, I lay flat on the floor with my head and shoulders hanging down. I stared down into her face. ‘No,’ I bellowed, ‘I think it’s
you
who’s fucked.’ Then I began slashing her hands with the bottle.

She fell, but her final words whipped back at me in the rotor wind. ‘Killing . . . me . . . won’t stop it . . .’

Right about then hell opened its gates and welcomed me in.

 

 

 

 

I
slammed the ’copter’s door and we lifted away a little. Priers converged into the airspace above Bau’s fallen body, a plague of them as busy as wasps around a nest intruder.

‘What now?’ said Mal.

‘Over to you.’ I gave her the grimmest of smiles and went back to staring fixedly out of the window at Bau’s body.

She was alive, her back broken, I guessed.

The shape-changers crept up on her, driven by their hunger despite the cacophony above.

Mal grunted. ‘The Priers aren’t even trying to help her.’

‘They never do,’ I said dully.

‘I can keep us alive while they’re camming, if I stay down here among them. But when they’ve finished, her Militia will most likely incinerate us.’

‘I knew that.’

I crawled into the seat next to Mal. I didn’t say sorry. She’d signed on for this bit, so I guessed she was ready.

‘My story . . . do you think anyone listened?’ I asked.

Mal pulled a face.

We laughed and continued to hover, Mal with her thoughts and me turning Bau’s last words inside out, over and over, until . . .

‘Shit, Mal,’ I said, softly. ‘We have to get out of this. There’s something I still have to do.’

Her jaw dropped at my demented optimism. ‘Well, I think you’ve left it too late.’

I looked around desperately for some reason to hope to materialise.

For once, just for once, it did.

ULs thronged in around us as cover - and as an escort.

Bau’s Militia buzzed and roared above them like leashed guard dogs straining to get at a prowler. Even they couldn’t risk the LTA coverage of a massacre of innocent spectators.

I switched the screen to CommonNet. It was crazy with cheering and wild rumour. A book was already running on whether the Banks would adopt me as royalty. The Tert had claimed me as its own sort of hero. I flicked back to OneWorld. The reportage was sombre, unable to deny the horror of Dis. Already links to Sera Bau were being unearthed.

I let it flow over me, drinking in the power of rumour and scandal.

Mal kept us hovering tight among the ULs like a queen bee at the centre of her swarm.

The UL armada worked on my psyche in the same way as the bikes powering across the waste had - the thrill of being in a pack. But this was better. This pack was working for me.

They shepherded us towards the grey beach of Fishertown while Bau’s Militia paced us overhead, waiting for a chance, and the net traffic went into a frenzy of accusations.

Then it stopped.

Just like that.

All nets.

All frequencies.

Mal gave a shout of triumph.

I felt a smile trying to crease my face. The first real one in so long that my jaw wouldn’t cooperate.
You wanted a revolution, Gerwent.
I sent my thought silently to the dead man.
Well, maybe you got one.

Mal came to her senses first. ‘We need to get down. Quick. Before the Militia decide to take a chance at wasting us.’

She dumped us hard and fast on a patch of beach where Mama was waiting, shaven head looming above the crowd, fat belly pushing folk aside.

I fell out of the ’copter into his arms. ‘I’ve got to talk to Teece.’

‘You look like dog meat.’ The ex-sumo was not impressed despite the cheering on every side. ‘Didn’t I say you had it coming?’

I burst into tears.

He held me at arm’s length, relenting. ‘You take a bike later, after dark. Those bastards be gone by then.’

I squinted into the sky as three Militia bats swept low over the beach. ‘How do you know that?’

‘’Cos tonight the city be going to the shit.’

 

Mama was right: the bats kept us guessing until sunset. Then they disappeared, leaving the skies eerily quiet.

From the entrance of his tent I watched them go.

Outside, his women were cooking fish and damper and shouting at their children. Despite the evening noises and rowdy celebrations something was missing. Net flicker. As if the noisiest person had just left the party.

Even somewhere as poor as Fishertown, the disappearance of the energy of a continual flow of information had left the place feeling hollow.

‘You did this, Plessis?’ Mama stared mournfully at the blank, lifeless screen under the canopy of his tent.

‘I-I guess so.’

He sighed. ‘You better get moving on soon, then. Some of these people gonna hate you.’

I watched those people drinking and laughing, not sure what he was talking about.

Later on, after the wrestling and skulling matches had finished, I saw what he meant. As though by reflex each person drifted to a nearby screen, stopping to stare, willing something to show.

‘You think it will be that bad?’ I asked.

One of Mama’s wives handed me the hot bread and some greasy fish.

I thanked her and watched him fiddle with a small flat box.

‘What’s that?’

‘Wireless. Hobby.’ He puffed between each word as he scraped corrosion off a flat metal plate inside it.

‘Listen,’ he hissed, punching the frequency finder.

After a while we caught something. A young voice, frightened.

The reception floated away into the night. Mama kept punching the frequency finder but the other signals were too weak.