Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [9]
Still, a bet was a bet.
‘Got any last-minute advice?’ he asked his friends.
‘Yeah,’ said Oniki. ‘Talk politics.’
You could see the undertown through the hole in the floor, points of light in the misty darkness below. Simon gulped down his laced vodka. ‘Listen,’ Sibongile was saying. ‘Why do you think neofeudalism was established in the first place?’
She didn’t wait for Simon to answer. He’d noticed that she never did. It was as if she was holding a one-size-fits-all conversation. ‘The aristocracy were supposed to act as a check on the corporations, but you only have to look at the board of ElleryCorp to know that they’ve been co-opted into the system.
The Marquess of Aktan is a nonexecutive director for chrissakes!
The shampooing Sector Lord, a direct appointee of the Empress, has a direct line into ElleryCorp. And you better believe it goes both ways. You see where the bulk of his feudal levee goes – are they on the DMZ facing the Sontarans? I don’t think so: they’re all propping up the governments of Castus, Eridani and Asume where ElleryCorp just happens to have most of its manufacturing plants. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
28
‘Yeah,’ said Simon. ‘There’s corruption.’ She was wearing thigh-high lace-up boots; also rhino hide, only black. He wondered if he could persuade her to leave them on.
‘Not just corruption,’ she leant in to him to make her point. ‘A systemic undermining of the whole neofeudal order. And who pays the price? Same people that always pay the price: bottom ten per cent. They’re the ones that get drafted and can’t afford a substitution. Hell, most of them do it for the bounty fee anyway.
They get sent off to the rim systems to get shampooed up the pondorossa by some bug-eyed monster, and for what?’
‘To maintain corporate cash flow,’ said Simon.
She actually stopped talking and grinned at him. All right!
thought Simon. Now we’re getting down to business.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m flitting for a meeting soon. We’re looking at ways to oppose the levee. Do you want to come?’
He did his best to look earnest. ‘Yeah, sounds interesting.’
Touchdown! Crowd goes wild.
He would look back on that moment and think that it was a hell of a way to start a career in terrorism.
Dis
She had two rooms: one for sleeping in and one for being awake in. There was also an alcove with a fresher and ablution facilities but that didn’t count. She was encouraged to adjust the colour of the walls to suit her moods, but she generally kept them a snowy white. She found it soothing.
Meals arrived by micro-transmat in the room for being awake in, along with a big blunt spoon to eat them with. There were no sharp edges anywhere. Even the rooms had soft rounded corners.
There were no windows and no visible doors.
Over the years – and she was sure it had been years even though she wasn’t certain how many years it had been – she had fallen into a routine. In the morning she would step into the fresher and set it on combination scrub and isometric exercise.
Then she would order breakfast and tell the simcord to give her a random news summary.
29
She had access to only one media feed, EmpireGold, whose bias was definitely towards the cheerful but often had good reality shows – My Family: Right or Wrong? was her favourite.
She liked to fill her head with other people’s concerns – it helped to pass the time.
The simcord timer always conspicuously showed the time and date, the better for her to understand the passage of time.
Sometimes the date would change abruptly, jumping forward or backward, a few days usually, sometimes a month and on one terrifying occasion a whole year.
Losing a year (or had she gained it?) had frightened her so much that she’d asked for medication to be stepped up. They said that the incidence of this phenomenon was declining,