The Mandel Files (107 page)

She killed her first man at sixteen; a People’s Constable who was lured out of a warm pub on to a dark building site by a halter top, a mini skirt, and a smile that promised. The rest of her platoon were waiting for him with clubs and a Smith and Wesson. They were all blooded that night.

Suzi threw up afterwards, with Greg holding her until the shudders subsided.

“You can go home now,” he said. “You’ve had your revenge.”

But she glanced at the broken body, and answered, “No, this is just the hand, not the head. They’ve all got to go, or what we’re doing will be pointless.”

Greg had looked terribly sad, but then he always did when anyone talked about vengeance, or let their grief show. It wasn’t until years later she found out why he always seemed to be hurt so much by other people’s pain.

The next morning she cut her hair, spiked it, and dyed it purple. Standard procedure; a lot of people in the pub would have given her description to the Constables.

The Trinities taught her discipline and self-confidence, as well as a hell of a lot about weapons, filling in all the technical gaps Welbeck had left. She was young enough to be good at it, and smart enough to use her anger as inspiration rather than let it rule her.

There were gangs like the Trinities in every town in the country, battling to overthrow the PSP. Suzi considered herself to be part of a crusade, making everything she did right.

Then they won. President Armstrong was killed, the PSP was routed, the Second Restoration returned the royal family to the throne, the first elections gave the New Conservatives a huge majority, and everything suddenly became complicated. The PSP relics, their Constables and apparatchiks, banded together as the Blackshirts, went underground, and turned to ineffectual civil disobedience that petered out after a few years. The Trinities fought them, naturally. But it wasn’t appreciated any more. They were too crude, too visible; people were looking to cut free from the past.

It ended as it had run on for ten years—in bloodshed. A two-day firefight between the Trinities and the Blackshirts that left Mucklands Wood and Walton in ruins. The government had to call out the army to put a halt to it.

Suzi survived to be picked up by the army. Her barrister was the best available, paid for by sympathizers of the antiPSP cause, of which there were plenty. She got a twenty-five-year sentence, because the New Conservative government wanted to demonstrate it was showing no favouritism. On appeal, held quietly and unpublicized by a co-operative press, it was reduced to five. She served eighteen months, fifteen in an open prison that allowed weekend leave.

The closed universe of the sewer was familiar enough now for any abnormality to register; Suzi had almost forgotten the limp reality which lay outside. And there was definitely something else in the pipe with her. A cool pulse of excitement slipped along the optical fibre as the cockroach hurried onwards.

In front of her the bloated hump which was blocking a quarter of the pipe glowed a rich crimson, flecked by weaker claret smears. It was a rat, gnawing at some fetid titbit clasped between its forepaws. Huge glass-smooth hemispherical eyes turned to look at Suzi, the nose twitched.

She remembered all those fantasy quest novels she used to read as a child, princess sorcerers and fell beasties. Grinning wryly, none of them had ever gone up against dragon-sized rodents.

Initiate Defence Mode.

A pair of flexible antennae deployed on either side of the cockroach’s head, swinging forward, long black rods curved like callipers. The rat hadn’t moved, staring seemingly in surprise at the intruder in its domain. Suzi halted twenty centimetres away, antennae quivering at the ready.

It came at her with a fast fluid grace, mouth widening to reveal serrated tombstone teeth, forepaw reaching out to pin her down, black talons extended. The descending paw brushed against the cockroach’s erect antenna tips. Suzi’s vision was wiped out in an explosion of sparkling white light as the electroplaque cells below the cockroach’s carapace discharged through the antennae.

When the purple mist cleared she could just see the rat’s beefy hindquarters pumping furiously, tail held high, whipping from side to side.

A quick systems check showed she had enough charge left in the electroplaque cells to fend off two more assaults. Guidance graphics told her there was another twelve metres to go before she reached the junction she wanted.

Suzi moved forwards. This underworld was no different to her own, she thought, except it was more honest. Down here you either ate or got eaten, and everything knew where it stood in relation to everything else, the knowledge sequenced into its DNA. In her world nothing was so simple, everybody wore a chameleon coat these days, status unknown.

After prison she had picked up work on the hardline side of tekmerc deals, the combat missions which were launched when covert penetrations and clandestine data snatches had failed.

At first it had been as part of a team, then as word got around about her competence and reliability she commanded her own. She began to add dark specialists to her catalogue—hotrods, ‘ware spivs, pilots, Frankenstein surgeons, sac psychics. Companies with problems sought her out to organize the whole deal for them. She was the interface between corporate legitimacy and the misbegotten, the cut-off point.

She had picked up the Morrell deal four months ago. It was straightforward enough, a simple data snatch. Morrell was a small but ambitious microgee equipment company in Newcastle, a subcontractor supplying components to the giant kombinates for their space operations.

Space was in vogue now, the new boom industry; ever since the Event Horizon corporation had captured a nickel-iron asteroid and manoeuvred it into orbit forty-five thousand kilometres above the Earth.

Because Event Horizon was registered in England, the rock came under the jurisdiction of the English parliament, who named it New London and established a Crown Colony in the hollowed-out core. New London ushered in an era of ultra-cheap raw materials, which were eagerly consumed by the necklace of microgee factories in low orbit above the equator, doubling their profitability virtually overnight. Mining chunks of rock from New London was easy enough, but refining metals and minerals out of the ore in a freefall environment presented difficulties, that was where the real money lay.

It was a problem which had led Suzi to a second-floor bistro in Peterborough’s New Eastfield district on a muggy day in January. She was thankful for the bistro’s smoked glass windows and air conditioning; the building opposite was buffed white stone, inlaid by balconies with mock-Victorian ironwork. It gleamed like burnished silver from the low sun. The street below was a flux of people, men in spruce shirts and shorts, salon-groomed women in light dresses, most of them with wide-brimmed hats, all of them with sunglasses. Silent cars glided down the rain-slicked road, bumper to bumper Mercs, Jags, and Rollers. New Eastfield had been ascendant even in the PSP years, but since Event Horizon cracked giga-conductor technology and reindustrialization went into overdrive the district had become a beacon for the smart money and the brittle, propitious lifestyle which went with it.

“Morrell have developed a cold-fusion solution to ionic streaming,” said the man sitting opposite her. He was in his late thirties, with a gym-installed muscle-tone to compliment his salon manicure. An image as tabloid as his power-player attitude. The name he gave her was Taylor Faulkner.

Suzi’s tame hotrod, Maurice Picklyn, had run a tracer on him for her, and that actually was his name. Working for Johal HF in their orbital refinery division, executive rather than technical.

“Cold fusion?” Suzi asked.

“Pie in the sky,” Faulkner sighed. “Too good to be true. But somehow they’ve done it, boosted efficiency and lowered power consumption at the same time. Old story; small companies have to innovate, they don’t have the research budget that shaves off a percentage point each year.”

She sipped at her orange juice. “And you want to know what they’ve got?”

“Yes. They’ve finished the data simulation, now they’re starting to assemble a prototype. Once that’s been demonstrated, they’ll be given access to kombinate-level credit facilities by the banks and finance houses. They’ve already asked for proposals from several broker cartels; which is how we found out what they’re working on.”

“Humm.” Suzi used her processor implant to review the data profile Maurice Picklyn had assembled on Johal HF; a fifth of their cashflow came from refining New London’s rock. “What’s my budget?”

“Four hundred K, New Sterling.”

“No, seven hundred. The licence alone would cost you that, even if Morrell grant you one, and then you’d be paying them royalties straight out of your profits.”

“Very well.”

She took a week to review Morrell’s security layout. The company had taken a commercial unit on a landfill site that used to be one of the Tyne’s shipyards. Its research labs and prototype assembly shop were physically isolated, a cuboid composite building sitting at the centre of a quadrangle formed by offices and cybernetics halls. And there was a lot of weapons hardware in the gap. The only way in to the research section was through the outer structure, then over a small bridge, clearing five security checks on the way. A team of psychic nulls working in relay prevented any espersense intrusion. The research division mainframe wasn’t plugged in to any datanet, so no hotrod could burn in. She had to admit it was a good set up. The only way to breach it physically would be an airborne assault. That lacked both finesse and an acceptable probability of success.

She started to review personnel, which led to the discovery of the company’s blind spot. Because it was impossible to physically carry data out of the research building, Morrell security only vetted the workers once a year, a full data and espersense scan.

Maurice Picklyn found her three possibles from the ionic streaming project’s research team, and she selected Chris Brimley, a programmer specializing in simulating vacuum exposure stresses: unmarried, twenty-nine, unadventurous, a Round Tabler whose main interest was fishing. He lived by himself in Jesmond, renting a flat in a converted terrace house. A perfect pawn.

Suzi did a deal with Josh Laren, a local small-time hood who owned a nightclub, L’Amici, which had a gambling licence. She set up Col Charnwood, a native Geordie and one of her regular team, with a stash of narcotics any pusher would envy. Paid Jools the Tool to stitch together the cockroach. Then to complete the operation, she called Amanda Dunkley up to Newcastle. Amanda Dunkley had a body specifically rebuilt for sin, with a small rechargeable sac at the base of her brain which fed themed neurohormones into her synaptic clefts. The psychic trait which the neurohormones stimulated was a very weak ESP, giving her an uncanny degree of empathy. Maurice Picklyn manufactured a fresh identity for her, and Suzi got her a secretarial job at the city council building.

Three days after Chris Brimley bumped into Amanda in his local pub, his old girlfriend had been dumped. Two days after that Amanda had moved into his flat. In the house on the other side of the street, which Suzi had leased as a command post, she and the rest of her team settled down in front of the flatscreens and enjoyed themselves watching the blue and grey photon-amp images of Chris Brimley’s bedroom. It took Amanda a week and a half to corrupt his body with her peerless sexual talent. After long nights during which his whole body seemed to be singing hosannas he told her he wanted them to be together for ever, to get married, to live happily in a picturesque cottage in a rural village, for her to have ten babies with him. Corrupting his mind took a little longer.

Chris Brimley slowly came to the realization that his life didn’t offer much in the way of interest to his newfound soul mate. They began to venture out at the weekends, then it was two or three nights a week. They discovered L’Amici, which Amanda loved, which made him happy. Col Charnwood introduced himself, so delighted to be their friend he gave them a gift. Nibbana, one of the most expensive designer drugs on the market, though Chris Brimley didn’t know that.

He tried a few chips on the table, egged on by an excited Amanda. It was fun. The manager was surprisingly relaxed about credit.

After two months Chris Brimley had a nibbana habit that needed three regular scores a day to satisfy, and a fifty-thousand-pound New Sterling debt with L’Amici. They couldn’t afford to go out any more, and now Amanda cried a lot in the evening, showering him with concern. Chris Brimley had actually slapped her once when she found him searching her bag for money.

Josh Laren’s office was a dry dusty room above L’Amici, the only furniture his teak desk, three wooden chairs, and an antique metal filing cabinet. Ten cases of malt whisky, smuggled over the Scottish border, were stacked against one wall.

Col Charnwood spent an hour going over the room with a sensor pad, sweeping for bugs. It wasn’t that Suzi mistrusted Josh Laren; in his position she would have wired it up.

The trembling Chris Brimley who walked into that office was unrecognizable as the clean-cut lad of two months previously. Suzi even felt a stab of guilt at his condition.

“I thought—” Chris Brimley began in confusion.

“Sit,” Suzi told him.

Chris Brimley lowered himself into the seat on the other side of the desk from her.

“You came here to discuss your debt, right?” she asked.

“Yes. But with Josh.”

“Shut the fuck up. For a welsh this size Josh has come to me.”

“Who—”

Suzi split her lip in a winter grin. “You really wanna know?”

“No,” he whispered.

“Good, maybe you’re beginning to realize how deep you’re in, boy. Let me lay it out for you, we’re gonna get that money back, every penny. My people had a lot of practice at that, never failed yet. Why we get called in. Two ways, hard and soft. Hard: first we clean you out, flat, furniture, bank, the same with that little slut you hang out with, then we start working down your family tree. We see that Morrell gets to know, they fire you, you’re instant unemployable.”