And if it doesn’t?
If it doesn’t, we’re already set up to cover. Quit worrying.
Set up to cover, yeah. And go on being a pimp for life. What you going to do about Chrissie then?
What he was going to do then, he reflected sombrely, was going to have to do about Chrissie then, was probably something violent. Should have seen that one all along – fucking bitch always had been high-maintenance, even back in Houston when she was still working street corners. Cotton-candy mane of blonde and that manicured fucking Texan drawl, and now the sub-cute tit work he’d got for her, he should have fucking known she’d start with the airs and graces as soon as she settled in at Tabitha’s. Acting just like she actually was the bonobo purebred they’d packaged her as. Calling him at all hours, or pushing Tabitha’s management so they called instead, bitching about how she wouldn’t work on account of some headache or stomach cramp or just plain didn’t like some fat fuck who’d paid good money to get between her legs, sitting there on the fucking bed, bright-eyed and whining Eddie this, Eddie that, Eddie the fucking other, forcing him to wheel out the whole nine yards of bully-threaten-cajole like it was some favourite comic routine she liked to see him do.
So why the fuck didn’t you just take Serena or Maggie for that sub-cute work instead. Either one’d be half the fucking trouble.
In the hyper-lucid blast of the syn, he knew why. But he turned on his heel and put the knowledge at his back along with the blink-blink carnal come-on of Tabitha’s skyline billboard. The relative gloom of the softly lit parking lot darkened his vision. He blinked hard to adjust.
‘Hello Max.’
The voice jolted him as he blinked, kicked him back to the Scorpion memories, to times and places so vivid he opened his eyes and almost expected to find himself back there, back before Wyoming in that other, cleaner time.
But he wasn’t.
He was still here, in the deserted parking lot of a second-rate Texas bordello, with a sassy whore’s snot drying on his fingers and too much syn for his own good sparking through his brain.
The figure detached itself from the shadows around his car, stood to face him. Soft violet light from the lot’s marker lamps threw the form into silhouette, killed facial recognition. But something about the stance chased up the memories the voice had stirred. The syn gave him a name, features to put on the darkened form. He stared, trying to make sense of it.
‘You?’
The figure shifted, made a low gesture with one hand.
‘But…’ He shook his head. ‘You… You’re on fucking Mars, man.’
The figure said nothing, waited. Eddie moved closer, arms raised towards a tentative hugging embrace.
‘When’d you get back? I mean, man, what are you doing back here?’
‘Don’t you know?’
He made a baffled smile, genuine in its origins. ‘No, man, I’ve got no fucking—’
-and the smile collapsed, bleached out with sudden understanding.
For just an instant, the desert quiet and the rushing away of an autohauler on the highway.
He clawed across his belly, under his jacket. Had fingers hooked around the butt of the compact Colt Citizen he kept cling-padded at his belt—
He’d moved too close.
The knowledge dripped through him, and it was a Scorpion knowing from that other time, somehow sad and slow despite the speed at which he could see it all coming apart. The figure snapped forward, bruising grip on his wrist and pinned his gun arm where it was. He flung up a warding left arm, chopped at the other man’s throat, or face, or, too close, too fucking close in, and here came the block, he had nothing, could do nothing. A low kick took out his legs from under him, a full body shove, and he went down. He rolled, desperately, don’t let the fucker get on you with his boots, land on your back maybe, the gun, the fucking gun–
The cling-clip held. He got a grip of the Colt’s butt again, dragged it loose and sprawled backward with a snarl of relief, raising the pistol, the Citizen had no safety, just squeeze hard and–
The figure stood over him, black against the sky. Arm down, pointing–
And something flattened him to the ground again, something with godlike force.
Muffled crack. His ears took it in, but it took him a couple of moments to assign it any importance. The stars were right overhead. He watched them, abruptly fascinated. They seemed a lot closer than you’d expect, hanging low, like they’d taken a sudden interest.
He wheezed, felt something leaking rapidly, like cold water in his chest. He knew what it was. The syn forced a merciless clarity.
He lifted his head and it was the hardest work he’d ever done, as if his skull were made of solid stone. He made out the figure of the other man, arm still pointing down at him like some kind of judgement.
‘I figured you’d fight,’ said the voice. ‘But it’s been a long time for you, hasn’t it. Too long. Maybe that’s why.’
Why what? he wondered muzzily. He coughed, tasted blood in his throat. Wondered also what Chrissie was going to do now, stupid little bitch.
‘I think you’re done,’ said the voice.
He tried to nod, but his head just fell back on the gritty surface of the lot, and this time it stayed there. The stars, he noticed, seemed to be dimming, and the sky looked colder than it had before, less velvet soft and more like the open void it really was.
Dead in a brothel parking lot, for fuck’s sake.
He heard the blastpast of another autohauler out on the highway, saw in his mind’s eye the cosy red glow of its tail-lights accelerating away into the darkness.
He ran to catch up.
PART II
Off the Hook
‘Curtailment of freedom is a powerful social tool and must be deployed as such, with wisdom and restraint. It is therefore vital to distinguish between the genuine and quite complex parameters of what is socially necessary, and the simplistic and emotive demands of a growing popular hysteria. Failure to make this distinction is likely to have unattractive consequences. ’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the end, it went down in the chapel, pretty much as he’d expected it would. Prisons like this didn’t offer many places free of surveillance, but Florida’s faith-based approach to rehabilitation meant that a man had a Charter-enshrined right to privacy in prayer at any hour outside of the night lockdown. No securicams, no invasive scrutiny. The theory was, presumably, that in the House of the Lord the corrections officers didn’t need to be watching you, because God already was. No one seemed to have noticed that the Lord was falling down on the job. In the three months since Carl transferred in from Miami, there’d been at least a half dozen bloody showdowns in the low-light arena of the chapel. Two ended in fatal injury.
Carl wasn’t sure if at some level prison staff were giving sanction to the fights, or if quiet and massive pressure from above kept the matter clean of investigation or review. In the end, it came to the same thing. No one wanted to buck the system, no one wanted to hear about it. Sigma Corporation, by invoking religious status for its operation, effectively sidestepped the bulk of what weak administrative oversight the Confederated Republic was prepared to endorse, and glowing testimonials at Congressional level pissed all over the rest. The bodies were taken away, shrink-wrapped in black.