"Please, for me," she pleaded.
"Right," his voice was distorted, as if he was chewing on something.
The pressure on Charlotte's arm increased, making her mouth part with the pain. She was turned to face the maid. The glazed eyes made her shiver inside. They didn't see anything in this universe.
"I will ask you some questions," the maid said. "You will answer them for me, or I will start to snap all that expensive bonework of yours. Understand, whore?"
"Let him go. I'll tell you anything you want. But don't hurt him."
Charlotte heard a muffled high-pitched crack from somewhere outside the den. She thought it sounded like some kind of weapon.
The maid gave a cyborg smile. "You're a very popular girl all of a sudden. Lots of people want to talk to you. But I'm first. And last."
The crack came again, then again.
"Who gave you the flower?" the maid asked.
It took Charlotte's wild thoughts a moment to work out what flower she was talking about. "Let Fabian go."
"The flower?"
"I don't know who he was, not his actual name. Please."
"Liar."
Charlotte's hand was grabbed. She screamed as two fingers were bent back. There was a pistol-shot snap.
Strangely enough, there wasn't any pain, not at first. She couldn't feel anything below her wrist, then a red-hot ache spread up her fingers, biting hard into her knuckles. There was bile rising in her throat. Her head began to spin alarmingly; for a moment she thought she was going to faint.
In horror she saw Fabian on his feet, lurching towards her and the maid. She lashed out with her free arm, knocking him back. His face was a mask of desperation and agony.
"Oh God no," she wailed, tears swelling up. He was regaining his balance, going to try again.
"ENOUGH OF THIS. FABIAN, STAY WHERE YOU ARE." The voice was an inhuman roar, loud enough to be painful. It was coming out of the music deck speakers, she realized.
Fabian ducked his head down in reflex, hands halfway to his ears. Even the maid was frozen.
The flatscreens came on, each one showing the same picture of a woman's face. Charlotte let out a choked cry as she recognized her. "Julia Evans," she gasped. It was her. Really her. Just like at the Newfields ball. That same compelling oval face.
Julian Evans smiled thinly. "Hello, Charlotte. I think it's about time you and I had a talk."
"Not a chance," said the maid.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Julia's personality package was coded as a commercial intelligence summary, so the Colonel Maitland's 'ware network-management program automatically assigned it storage space in the lightware cruncher Jason Whitehurst was using to analyse kombinate finances. Once it was loaded, the personality package immediately reformatted the command routines of the processing structure it was running in, isolating itself from the lightware's operating program and antiviral guardians. After it had confirmed its autonomy it sent out a series of instructions to the internal databuses, arrogating their handling procedures, shutting down the data flow.
With the lightware cruncher's processing operations suspended, the personality package began to wipe all the programs and files it found stored in the unit's memory. Access codes were changed. A new sequence of operating routines were loaded. The package's highly compressed data planes expanded into the empty lightware. Julia's reconstituted mentality came on line.
She started to assess the airship's 'ware architecture, spreading her presence through the datanet, burning into ancillary processor cores. The bridge's 'ware was her first priority, gaining complete command of her new domain. New channels were opened and safeguarded, data flowed back into the lightware cruncher.
The Colonel Maitland's flight control systems were plugged into a broad range of sensors and cameras distributed throughout the fuselage. Radar and the satellite uplinks were useless, swamped by the tekmerc's jammer. She studied the optical circuits, pulling their codes out of memory cores, then started to look around.
External camera, portside fuselage. The Messerschmitt hovered level with the gondola. A laser rangefinder pulsed every second, helping it to maintain its stand-off position exactly. Eight armour-clad figures were left swung out between it and the Colonel Maitland. Each of them identical, factory moulded; left hand controlling a jockey-stick, right hand holding a Lockheed rip gun. Two wavering columns of hot compressed air streamed out of the jetpack nozzles, behind and slightly below the shoulders. As she watched, one of them disappeared through a hole in the side of the gondola.
Internal camera, gondola lower-deck crew lounge. The lounge had been ravaged by the rip bolt, loose chairs hurled at the walls, composite walls cracked and buckled, carpet smouldering. Glass lay underfoot, the door twisted in its frame.
Two of the armoured figures were standing inside, Lockheed rip guns raised cautiously, covering the open doorway. Helmets blank bubbles of metal. A third swept through the hole, jetpack efflux stirring up a mini-hurricane of wreckage as he settled on the uneven decking.
External camera, upper tail fin. The ruined landing pad, pitiful remains of the Pegasus spewing out thin plumes of smoke. Two of the Colonel Maitland's crew, dressed in silvery fire-suits, were surveying the scene. They kept close to the edge of the pad, giving the Pegasus a wide birth as they shuffled along, testing the deck sheeting before each step.
Julia called up a structural schematic and systems status review from the bridge's flight control 'ware. The central gasbag, below the landing pad, had been badly lacerated. Helium was escaping at a critical rate. The bridge crew had ordered a near-total ballast dump to compensate. Water from tanks and the swimming-pool was venting out of the gondola as fast as it could be pumped.
The Colonel Maitland's geodetic framework was drawn in fine blue lines, gasbag suspension rigging a jumble of green cobwebs. A large, roughly oval, area of fuselage struts around the landing pad and hangar had turned red, fringed in yellow. The landing pad itself was mostly black; a lot of the stress sensors' optical cables had been cut in the explosions, leaving gaps in the picture. Maintenance drones were inching along the longitudinal frames, inspecting individual struts for fractures, supplementing and refining the data from the sensors, filling in the true status of the black zones.
The damage assessment was reassuring. The basic framework was bearing up under the redistributed loading. Power to the contra-rotating fans was being reduced, relieving as much pressure as possible until the upper fuselage frames could be repaired.
She accessed the bridge's memory cores and discovered that the maintenance drones communicated with the flight control 'ware via laser links; the entire geodetic framework was dotted with interface keys.
Internal camera, gondola stairwell. Greg and Suzi were moving to the upper deck. Suzi was brandishing her Browning in one hand, pulling Greg along with the other. She looked as if she was walking directly into a hurricane blast, face furrowed with concentration, teeth bared, every step an effort. Greg was moving like an unplugged junkie. Julia recognized the thousand-metre stare; his gland was active, dissolving the real universe.
Structural schematic. A patch of the gondola's upper-deck hull changed to red, shooting out a ripple ring of yellow. The red centre snapped to black. Another rip-gun bolt. Electrical lines were cut, fibre-optic links severed. Compensator programs assigned priorities and rerouted power and data.
External camera, portside fuselage. One of the armoured tekmerc squad had broken away from his colleagues, charging towards the gondola much too fast. He cannoned into a cabin through the gap in the hull which the rip gun had made, arm just catching the edge.