Archon's Queen (45 page)

She cringed. “I’m sorry, Orange. I’m desperate. Really, I didn’t look deep. All I got was what you were thinking about right at that moment. I swear I won’t peek again. It’s a habit… Only thing that’s kept me alive sometimes.”

“You wanna know? Okay, fine.” He tossed the gun on the desk with a clatter. “Maybe someday you’ll understand why people keep secrets.”

Orange shoved at his desk, rotating to face his rig. He swiped at a virtual display panel. One of the numerous holo-screens went from flat grey to showing a black box inside a blue frame. His finger poised over a holographic button. Conscience seemed to get the better of him, and he waited.

“Are you absolutely sure you want to see this, Pixie?”

She walked over and put a hand on the back of the chair. Her voice carried a hint of dread. “Yeah.”

His finger pierced the tiny square of light. A video feed filled the frame. A ceiling-mounted camera pointed down from the ceiling of a messy bedroom, aimed at a queen sized Comforgel pad. She squinted at it, sensing something familiar about the horrendous shambles. Shadows moved across the sheets as a door opened, letting light from the hallway leak in. The walls caught dark azure light from outside, and then a pudgy balding man waddled forward dragging an unconscious nude girl with holographic filament wings. As soon as Anna saw them, she clung to the chair to keep from falling to her knees.

Blake, from Bristol City, was carrying the woman she used to be. He paused a step inside the door and gave her a light throttling, screaming about her costing them money all day long and shouting about her lying there like a turd.

“This is what happens to whores who can’t handle their junk,” Blake shouted.

He threw her face-first into the bed, the electronic wings fluttering along with her brief flight. Her body landed limp as a corpse, stopping with a dull splat upon the gelatinous surface.

Looking up at the camera, he adjusted it and whispered to the lens.

“And this is how you make up for the money you lost. Greetings my loyal followers! Tonight we have Pixie for your viewing pleasure. No, the useless bint ain’t dead. She be strung out to hell and back like usual.”

With that, he stripped and climbed on top of her. Anna stared in horror, unable to turn away from the rape of her unconscious body. Orange looked to the side, one hand up to his temple to block his peripheral vision of the screen. From the color of his face, it was obvious he had seen it already.

Blake rolled her onto her back to give the audience a front view and threw her legs apart to the side. The tattoo grinned at the camera. After a minute’s pause for the viewer’s benefit, he was on her again. Blake didn’t even stop when his motion began to knock vomit out of her throat with every thrust.

Anna turned away, shaking. “That’s enough… I don’t want to see any more. Where did you get that?”

“The club sells the videos. I find them here and there in concealed network nodes when I go hunting for data with trade value. Think I found that one in the archives of some investment firm in The City.”

As the lights began to flicker, she forced herself to think about Twee. If she let her emotion out right here, all of Orange’s stuff would fry, and he’d never help her. She knocked some of his things from a shelf while stumbling to the exit.

Her voice blurred through the urge to sob. “Can you delete it? I mean… all of them?”

A pained expression came before a noncommittal offer. “I can try to slap together a hunter construct to track down and wipe the file wherever it finds it, but it won’t be able to touch offline storage, and it could take years to get every copy. You know the ‘net. Once something’s out there…”

She bit her lip. “Please start it. I gotta go. I’ll call you when I get out to the site.”

he sky rumbled with the thunder of unseen lightning. Anna looked up into the reflection of the rage boiling beneath her sorrow. Rain approached, it would soon be no weather to drive a motorbike in. She stashed it in an alley behind Orange’s flat, covering it with enough junk to keep it safe at least for a few days in case she needed it again. Cold whistling gusts sent ripples through her white orb of hair. She stood motionless, a lone piling in the river of people. Intermittent voices, pleasant greetings as well as pick-up lines, churned into an endless din of shuffling feet and traffic.

A great burst of wind and water vapor swept down the street as a maglev tram whisked overhead. The row of silent metal boxes flowed around a sweeping curve, ascending a long ivory thread into the tenth story of a building. Anna observed the world happen as though the city existed without her in it, a detached spectator looking from afar.

She lowered her gaze, catching sight of an orb bot with a red umbrella peeking out from behind a massive beige and brown vendomat. It cringed behind the thousand-pound purveyor of synthetic Black & Tan. She continued to watch the spot until the autocab arrived.

As the car pulled away, the red umbrella appeared over the top of the vendomat, rising until the single lens eye came into view. Once it saw the car leave, it emerged and skimmed along the sidewalk above the crowd.

Her whisper fogged the window. “Damn bloody thing’s after me…”

For several blocks, the orb pursued. High enough not to hit or even be noticed by most pedestrians, it followed wherever the cab went.

Someone’s hacked it.
“Autocab, please stop here for a moment.”

“Abort current trip?”

“No. I need some air.”

“Trip pause feature is an additional two credits. Do you accept?”

“Fine, whatever.”

The autocab came to rest along the edge of a circus in the shadow of an old statue. Other cars continued past as the AI in the taxi announced she had five minutes before it would assess another fee. The red umbrella zipped around the corner a few seconds later. She tracked it drifting, waiting and watching until it passed near a streetlamp.

Anna’s arms shuddered as she lifted her palms upward and focused on the lamp. A jolt of power leapt skyward from the exploding fixture, wrapping over the orb and continuing into the clouds. Surrounded by flickering lightning, the small bot emitted a high-pitched squeal of distress as the umbrella caught fire and it wobbled out of control. People on the ground held cases and coats over their heads to shield themselves from falling droplets of molten plastisteel; the concussion of the detonating lamp sent many diving for cover.

Its digital scream grew louder and the orb rocketed forward into a spiraling, flaming corkscrew that smashed into the road. A series of cars ran the fragments down, crushing the orb into progressively flatter and flatter bits. Anna glared at the smoldering junk in the street, watching the chaos no one connected back to her. She wondered if the little thing that showed concern for her had always been them watching her, or if the twinge of guilt at ‘murdering’ it was deserved. She slid back into the autocab, and pulled the hatch down.

“Whoever you are, I hope that hurt.”

Early in the afternoon, the main room of Bristol City stood quiet. It contained only Lawrence the bartender and shafts of dusty sunlight piercing cracks in the black-painted windows. The soft metal song of hanging cages creaking back and forth drifted through the air.

Lawrence wagged his head at her. “Oi, we ain’t open yet. Come back after two.”

Anna traced her fingertips across the round tables under each cage she passed, ignoring him.

He came around the edge of the bar. “Hey, you deaf? I said we’re not open yet.”

They met at the edge of a silver stage with three dancing poles. He got in her face, not yet ready to lay a hand on the small woman in the black coat.

“Sod off, Larry. I got business with Blake.”

“Pixie? Zat you?” He gasped, eyes roaming. “Crikey! You look so different… Oi wait a minnit, didn’t Sanjay give you the sack?”

Two lights exploded in the rafters. She knew he meant fired, but all she saw in her mind was Blake’s naked paunch.

Lawrence jumped away from the fall of glass and sparks. “Bloody ‘ell.”

“Like I said, I got business with Blake.”

He stared at the smoking electronics for a moment, raising his arm at her. “Look, Pix. You know as well as I do I can’t just let you walk in back. ‘Specially after you’ve been fired. Company policy and all, ex-employees might be up to no good.”

“Oh, I’m definitely up to no good.” She flicked her eyes toward him. “Did you ‘appen to know of Blake’s video library?”

“Video library?”

Anna relaxed when Lawrence’s surface thoughts gave away his true ignorance of what Blake did to his girls. “He’s got a holo-recorder rig in his bedroom. He…”

Lawrence slackened his aggressive posture at the sight of a tear on her face. He looked away, shaking his head. “I’ll beat that fucker to death myself.” He punched the bar.

Anna put a hand on his shoulder. “No, Larry. It’s not your fault. I was smacked out. Too far gone to scream. I didn’t even know it happened until…”

“If Old Bill asks, I never saw ya.” He touched her arm as she moved to walk away. “You sure you’ll be okay?”

“Aye. Safe as houses.”

The coldness in her voice made him take a step back. He returned to the bar, muttering, calling himself an idiot for not noticing what his boss did.