Ralph exchanged a puzzled frown with Cathal, who merely shrugged.
“Don’t ask me, boss,” Cathal said.
Ralph ran a search program through his neural nanonics memory cells. The general encyclopedia section produced a file headed:
Nicotine Inhalation.
“Hey, you,” he said.
The man looked up and took another drag.
“SÍ
, seÑor.”
“That’s a bad habit, which is why no one has done it for five centuries. Govcentral even refused an export licence for nicotine
DNA.”
A sly, sulky smile. “After my time, seÑor.”
“What’s your name?”
“Santiago Vargas.”
“Lying little bastard,” Cathal Fitzgerald said. “We ran an ident check. He’s Hank Doyle, distribution supervisor for Moyce’s.”
“Interesting,” Ralph said. “Skibbow claimed to be someone else when he was caught: Kingsford Garrigan. Is that what the virus
is programmed to do?”
“Don’t know, seÑor. Don’t know any virus.”
“Where does it come from? Where do you come from?”
“Me, seÑor? I come from Barcelona. A beautiful city. I show you around sometime. I lived there many years. Some happy years,
and some with my wife. I died there.”
The cigarette glow lit up watery eyes which watched Ralph shrewdly.
“You died there?”
“
SÍ
, seÑor.”
“This is bullshit. We need information, and fast. What’s the maximum range of that white fire weapon?”
“Don’t know, seÑor.”
“Then I suggest you run a quick memory check,” Ralph said coldly. “Because you’re no use to me otherwise. It’ll be straight
into zero-tau with you.”
Santiago Vargas stubbed his cigarette out on the grass. “You want me to see how far I can throw it for you?”
“Sure.”
“Okay.” He climbed to his feet with indolent slowness.
Ralph gestured out over the deserted reaches of the park. Santiago Vargas closed his eyes and extended his arm. His hand blazed
with light, and a bolt of white fire sizzled away. It streaked over the grass flinging out a multitude of tiny sparks as it
went. At a hundred metres it started to expand and dim, slowing down. At a hundred and twenty metres it was a tenuous luminescent
haze. It never reached a hundred and thirty metres, evaporating in midair.
Santiago Vargas wore a happy smile. “All right! Pretty good, eh, seÑor? I practice, I maybe get better.”
“Believe me, you won’t have the opportunity,” Ralph told him.
“Okay.” He seemed unconcerned.
“How do you generate it?”
“Don’t know, seÑor. I just think about it, and it happens.”
“Then let’s try another tack. Why do you fire it?”
“I don’t. That was the first time.”
“Your friends didn’t have any of your inhibitions.”
“No.”
“So why didn’t you join them? Why didn’t you fight us?”
“I have no quarrel with you, seÑor. It is the ones with
passion
, they fight your soldiers. They bring back many more souls so they can be strong together.”
“They’ve infected others?”
“SÍ.”
“How many?”
Santiago Vargas offered up his hands, palms upwards. “I don’t think anyone in the shop escaped possession. Sorry, seÑor.”
“Shit.” Ralph glanced back at the burning building, just in time to see another section of roof collapse. “Landon?” he datavised.
“We’ll need a full list of staff on the nighttime shift. How many there were. Where they live.”
“Coming up,” the commissioner replied.
“How many of the infected left before we arrived?” he asked Santiago Vargas.
“Not sure, seÑor. There were many trucks.”
“They left on the delivery lorries?”
“
SÍ
. They sit in the back. You don’t have no driver’s seat these days. All mechanical. Very clever.”
Ralph stared in dismay at the sullen man.
“We’ve been concentrating on stopping passenger vehicles,” Diana Tiernan datavised. “Cargo traffic was only a secondary concern.”
“Oh, Christ, if they got on to the motorways they could be halfway across the continent by now,” Ralph said.
“I’ll reassign the AI vehicle search priority now.”
“If you find any of Moyce’s lorries that are still moving, target them with the SD platforms. We don’t have any other choice.”
“I agree,” Admiral Farquar datavised.
“Ralph, ask him which of the embassy pair was in Moyce’s, please,” Roche Skark datavised.
Ralph pulled a processor block from his belt, and ordered it to display pictures of Jacob Tremarco and Angeline Gallagher.
He thrust it towards Vargas. “Did you see either of these people in the shop?”
The man took his time. “Him. I think.”
“So we’ve still got to find Angeline Gallagher,” Ralph said. “Any more city traffic with glitched processors?”
“Three possibles,” Diana datavised. “We’ve already got two of them located. Both taxis from the spaceport.”
“Okay, assign an AT Squad to each taxi. And make sure there are experienced personnel in both of them. What was the third
trace?”
“A Longhound bus which left the airport ten minutes after the embassy trio landed; it was a scheduled southern route, right
down to the tip of Mortonridge. We’re working on its current location.”
“Right, I’m coming back to the police headquarters. We’re finished here.”
“What about him?” Nelson Akroid asked, jerking a thumb at the captive.
Ralph glanced back. Santiago Vargas had found another cigarette from somewhere and was smoking it quietly. He smiled. “Can
I go now, seÑor?” he asked hopefully.
Ralph returned the smile with equal honesty. “Have the zero-tau pods from
Ekwan
arrived yet?” he datavised.
“The first batch are due to arrive at Pasto spaceport in twelve minutes,” Vicky Keogh replied.
“Cathal,” Ralph said out loud. “See if Mr Vargas here will cooperate with us for just a little longer. I’d like to know the
limits of the electronic warfare field, and that illusion effect of theirs.” “Yes, boss.”
“After that, take him and the others on a sightseeing trip to the spaceport. No exceptions.” “My pleasure.”
• • •
The Loyola Hall was one of San Angeles’s more prestigious live-event venues. It seated twenty-five thousand under a domed
roof which could be retracted when the weather was balmy, as it so frequently was in that city. There were excellent access
routes to the nearby elevated autoway; the subway station was a nexus for six of the lines which ran beneath the city; it
even had seven landing pads for VIP aircraft. There were five-star restaurants and snack bars, hundreds of rest rooms. Stewards
were experienced and friendly. Police and promoters handled over two hundred events a year.
The whole site was an operation which functioned with silicon efficiency. Until today.
Eager kids had been arriving since six o’clock in the morning. It was now half past seven in the evening. Around the walls
they were thronging twenty deep; scrums outside the various public doors needed police mechanoids to maintain a loose kind
of order, and even they were in danger of being overwhelmed. The kids had a lot of fun spraying them with soft drinks and
smearing ice creams over the sensors.
Inside the hall every seat was taken, the tickets bought months ago. The aisles were filled with people, too, though how they
had got in past the processor-regulated turnstiles was anyone’s guess. Touts were becoming overnight millionaires, those that
weren’t being arrested or mugged by gangs of motivated fourteen-year-olds.
It was the last night of Jezzibella’s Moral Bankruptcy tour. The New California system had endured five weeks of relentless
media saturation as she swept across the asteroid settlements and down to the planetary surface. Rumour, of AV projectors
broadcasting illegal activent patterns during her concerts to stimulate orgasms in the audience (not true, said the official
press release, Jezzibella has abundant sexuality of her own, she doesn’t need artificial aids to boost the Mood Fantasy she
emotes). Hyperbole, about the President’s youngest daughter being completely infatuated after meeting her, then sneaking out
of the Blue Palace to go backstage at her concert (Jezzibella was delighted and deeply honoured to meet all members of the
First Family, and we are not aware of any unauthorized entry to a concert). Scandal, when two of the band, Bruno and Busch,
were arrested for violating public decency laws in front of a senior citizens holiday group, their bail posted at one million
New California dollars (Bruno and Busch were engaged in a very wonderful, sensitive, and private act of love; and that bunch
of filthy old perverts used enhanced retinas to spy on them). Straight hype, when Jezzibella visited (as a private citizen—so
no sensevises, please) a children’s ward in a poor district of town, and donated half a million fuseodollars to the hospital’s
germ-line treatment fund. Editorial shock at the way she flaunted her thirteen-year-old male companion, Emmerson (Mr Emmerson
is Jezzibella’s second cousin, and his passport clearly states he is sixteen). A lot of spectator fun, and official police
cautions, derived from the extraordinarily violent fights between her entourage’s security team and rover reporters. The storm
of libel writs issued by Leroy Octavius, her manager, every time anyone suggested she was older than twenty-eight.
And in all those five weeks she never gave an interview, never made a single public utterance outside of her stage routine.
She didn’t have to. In that time, the regional office of Warner Castle Entertainment datavised out thirty-seven million copies
of her new MF album
Life Kinetic
across the planet’s communications net to worshipful fans; her back catalogue sold equally well.
The starship crews who normally made a tidy profit from selling a copy of an MF album to a distributor in star systems where
they hadn’t been officially released yet cursed their luck when they arrived on planets where Jezzibella had passed through
in the last eighteen months. But then that was the point of being a touring artist. A new album every nine months, and visit
ten star systems each year; it was the only way you could beat the bootleggers. If you weren’t prepared to do that, the only
money you ever got was from your home star system. Few made the transition from local wonder to galactic megastar. It took
a lot of money to travel, and entertainment companies were reluctant to invest. The artist had to demonstrate a colossal degree
of professionalism and determination before they were worth the multimillion-fuseodollar risk. Once they’d breached the threshold,
of course, the old adage of money making more money had never been truer.
High above the costly props and powerful AV stacks onstage, an optical-band sensor was scanning the crowd. Faces merged into
a monotonous procession as it swept along the tiers and balconies. Fans came in distinct categories: the eager exhilarated
ones, mostly young; boisterous and expectant, late teens; impatient, already stimmed-out, nervous, fearfully worshipful, even
a few who obviously wanted to be somewhere else but had come along to please their partner. Every costume Jezzibella had ever
worn in an MF track was out there somewhere, from the simple to the peacock bizarre.
The sensor focused on a couple in matching leathers. The boy was nineteen or twenty, the girl at his side a bit younger. They
had their arms around each other, very much in love. Both tall, healthy, vital.
Jezzibella cancelled the datavise from the sensor. “Those two,” she told Leroy Octavius. “I like them.”
The unpleasantly overweight manager glanced at the short AV pillar sticking out of his processor block, checking the two blithesome
faces. “Roger dodger. I’ll get on it.”
There was no quibbling, not the faintest hint of disapproval. Jezzibella liked that; it was what made him such a good manager.
He understood how it was for her, the things she required in order to function. She needed kids like those two. Needed what
they’d got, the naivete, the uncertainty, the delight at life. She had none of that left, now, not the sweet side of human
nature. The eternal tour had drained it all away, somewhere out among the stars; one energy which could leak out of a zero-tau
field. Everything became secondary to the tour, feelings weren’t allowed to interfere. And feelings suppressed long enough
simply vanished. But she couldn’t have that, because she needed an understanding of feelings in order to work. Circles. Her
life was all circles.
So instead of her own emotions, she familiarised herself with this alien quality which others owned, examining it as if she
were performing a doctoral thesis. Absorbed what she could, the brief taste allowing her to perform again, to fake it through
yet one more show.
“I don’t like them,” Emmerson said petulantly.
Jezzibella tried to smile at him, but the whole charade of pandering to him bored her now. She was standing, stark naked,
in the middle of the green room while Libby Robosky, her personal image consultant, worked on her dermal scales. The bitek
covering was a lot more subtle than a chameleon layer, allowing her to modify her body’s whole external texture rather than
simply changing colour. For some numbers she needed to have soft, sensitive skin, a young girl who quivered at her first lover’s
touch; then there was the untainted look, a body which was naturally graceful without workouts and fad diets (like the girl
she’d seen through the hall’s sensor); and of course the athlete/ballerina body, supple, hard, and muscular—big favourite
with the boys. It was the feel of her which everyone out there in the hall wanted to experience; Jezzibella in the flesh.
But the tiny scales had a short lifetime, and each one had to be annealed to her skin separately. Libby Robosky was an undoubted
wizard when it came to applying them, using a modified medical nanonic package.
“You don’t have to meet them,” Jezzibella told the boy patiently. “I can take care of them by myself.”
“I don’t want to be left alone all night. How come I can’t pick someone out of the audience for myself?”
As the reporters had been allowed to discover, he really was only thirteen. She’d brought him into the entourage back on Borroloola,
an interesting plaything. Now after two months of daily tantrums and broodiness the novelty value had been exhausted. “Because
this is the way it has to be. I need them for a reason. I’ve told you a hundred times.”