• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ming's neck cracked as her head came off her desk. Zap blackout, she thought, how many have I taken? The terminal screen was fuzzy, and she squinted it into focus - 71 per cent power availability.

How long had she been out?

'Boss!'

'What?'

'Verhoevan says he's ready.'

'Where's Murphy One?'

'On its way.'

'Verhoevan?'

On a media feed Ming saw Verhoevan plug Ids finger into a handy socket. 'Yeah?'

'What the hell are you wearing?'

'Don't ask.'

'The President's on his way.'

'I never would have guessed, have we got the power?'

'Yes, but get on with it.'

'Guess what?'

'What?'

'I'm going to be on the podium with the rest of the high and mighty.'

Ming cut the connection. Her head was beginning to throb. The customer complaints mainframe had crashed, the negative calls display was filled with gibberish. The main display had zoomed in on the Acturus Terminal schematix, the Stunnel had become a thick silver cable, the terminus a cone in semi-opaque green, the offshoot of the Central Line a thinner cable in red that trailed off screen. White lines were overlaid on the image, the room temperature superconductors that would cany the power from all over the system to the Stunnel gateway. Junction markers were picked out as blue triangles clustering around the open end of the green cone; on the master board the power conduits were highlighted, the beast's nervous system laid suddenly bare.

Ming stood up, stepped over to the rail and leaned over. Down in the pit the controllers all turned to stare up at her.

'All right children,' said Ming, 'let's crank it up.'

Kings Cross (Central Line)

Kadiatu came running out of the Paris Axis platform. Behind her the wasp whine of the ticket drone followed. It had picked her up when she changed at Manderlay, tracking her by pheremone and heat signature. She could have lost it in a crowd. but today there weren't any crowds. The ECM crystal plaited into her hair was useless: this close any interference pattern would light her up like a shop display. Somewhere behind the drone was an inspector, by law a human being, slowly closing in to arrest her.

Kings Cross was an old station from the time when train tunnels were just long horizontal holes in the ground. An evolved station not a planned one, a ganglia that gathered up half the transcontinental feeder lines that quilted Europe, a messy disorder of physical tunnels and a good place to lose a ticket drone.

She jumped into a lift marked Krakow in blue letters, breathing hard as the field snapped her two hundred metres up the shaft and on to the platform. The indicator hologram said the next train was in three minutes, not soon enough. A couple of men were standing underneath the sign, not enough of them either. They looked wary as Kadiatu ran towards them, two respectable English guys in topknots and linen kaftans. 'Lend us fifty,' she said as they backed away. 'I just need it for the fare home.'

Too late. She could hear the ticket drone again, its engine whine echoing in the lift shaft. 'Shouldn't be allowed,' said one of the men as Kadiatu dashed for the exit.

She should have known better than to get cosy with some low life from the Stop. Now she was gatecrashing the transit system with no moneypen and twenty grand in debt to Max That wasn't going to be six hours walking-around time with no kinky stuff. Max was going to invent new perversions to pay off twenty thousand. Except it wasn't going to come to that. because she was going to catch up with Blondie, get her money back and then some.

First she had to ditch the ticket drone.

Acturus Terminal (Stunnel Terminus)

Power fed into the gravitic induction field, and the attractors started to whirl. Biting into the soft stuff of reality like drill teeth into sandstone. It was silent work, an operation on a level far away from human senses, but in his mind Verhoevan thought he heard the space-time continuum groaning under the assault. Data flowed past the peripheral vision of his left eye. The alarming fluctuations in the carrier wave had ceased, the signal was good and strong.