Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [21]
'I'm just getting to the good bit,' said Roberta. A flash of silver amongst the discarded clothes. Roberta creeping over. timing her movements with the hoarse cries of the woman. reaching out a hand to snatch at the bright metal tube.
'What are you going to do with it?' asked Zamina. Moneypens being a difficult prospect at the best of times. 'She's bound to report it stolen.'
'Got to be worth something though,' said Roberta as they finished the last of the stairs.
She was waiting for them outside their flat, a bundle of rags just like any other catfood monster that ever died on a cold landing in the projects. Later Zamina would ask herself how far you could twist the patterns of life to create a coincidence like that. Roberta would have put it down to accumulated karma, just another way in which the fates conspire to fuck you up, but by then Roberta was already dead.
'Hey you,' said Roberta, 'go die on your own porch.'
'Wait up,' said Zamina, 'it moved.'
'So what?'
Zamina squatted by the bundle. It was a woman in a ripped-up jumpsuit. The skin through the rents in the material was coated in a dried layer of blue paint. Zamina sniffed the air cautiously, expecting the usual cocktail of sweat, faeces and cheap protein.
'Let's take her inside.'
'Are you crazy?' said Roberta. 'It'll stink the place out.'
'She don't smell of nothing,' said Zamina, but it wasn't true. The woman smelt of dry dust and snakeskin boots, she smelt of the high plateau of the coyboy's desert. 'Open the door.'
Roberta unlocked the door but didn't help Zamina drag the woman in. As her shoulders crossed the threshold the dried blue paint on the woman's face gently cracked and she smiled.
'I have come to save you all,' she murmured.
'A schizie,' said Roberta. 'That's all we need.'
STS Central - Olympus Mons
They left Old Sam back at the office, jacked into a Hitachi with strict instructions to flatten his alpha waves if he even threatened to wake up. Banked and tranked as Dogface put it. Lambada had wanted Old Sam put on ice for the duration, but it wasn't much of an argument - what they'd seen in Acturus Station was too fresh in their minds.
And there was still no media response to events so far. Even The Bad News Show had shifted smoothly to a standard security raid in some Melbourne township. Local cops banging down doors, wristwired suspects lying face down in the dirt. It could have been edited together out of archive footage.
Only the high-clearance data links gave it away. VIP shuttles and cop-wagons racing down feeders and freight lines, screaming priority signalling overrides that fouled up the network from Thethys to Mogadishu. Sirens echoing down the long non-tunnels of the system. All of them converging on Reykjavik, coagulants on their way to stem the haemorrhage in the body politic.
So the floozies rode the big elevator up to Central in silence until halfway up when Dogface couldn't stand it any longer and asked just how long it took to put together an interim government.
Nobody knew.
When they got to Central, Ming looked almost grateful to see Dogface and anyone glad to see Dogface, thought Blondie, is in big trouble.
They sat around the big analysis tank in the conference room. Credit Card was scaling down the reconstruction of the Stunnel initiation, a twenty-digit time code flicked past microseconds in the left-hand comer.
'There,' said Ming and the simulation froze.
Inside the tank was a simplified three-dimensional representation of flow channels around Acturus Station. The Stunnel carrier wave was a silver thread entered from the top left-hand comer and belled out into a disc at the station gateway. The station itself was a transparent block in the shadow grey that was used to depict 'solid' installations. A spider web of power conduits surrounded the gateway in shades of blue, the lighter the shade the higher the loading. At the point of initiation the web was the colour of summer lightning.
Dogface unfolded his arms and stuck his finger into the jack at the base of the tank. The timecode flicked