Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [32]
The words were like polymer chains, all woven together in an unbreakable cord.
Zamina glanced at Roberta. The comer of her mouth was turned up, a little half-smile that said she was enjoying herself Deep in Billy Boy's eyes hunger blossomed, hunger for me scheme. Even the bimbettes on the margins of the room were leaning in trying to catch the gist, child faces wide open and vulnerable. Zamina could see that Benny was chaining them up with her words.
Suddenly she was scared all over again.
Olympus Mons West
Sleep altered Old Sam's face. It softened out the rigid contours of his cheekbones and smoothed the violent lines that surrounded the eyes. His long dreadlocks were spread around his head, black at the tips, shading through grey to white towards the scalp.
'Is he dreaming?' asked Blondie.
Dogface shook his head and checked the illuminated LCD on the monitor. 'He doesn't dream.' The bio-monitor was battered Hitachi, its leads jacked into the old-fashioned plug behind Old Sam's ear. 'Something to do with the interface.'
Blondie looked at the matt grey oval on his own index finger. 'I still dream,' he said.
'Whole other technology that,' said Dogface. 'Oid Sam here, he's the old model, got himself an artificial nervous system when he signed on. Drove a lot of them crazy after the war, not dreaming. That and not having kids.'
'What was wrong with them?'
'Government had the patent on their genesets. They're functionally sterile so any kid would have to be spliced up in a lab. Government won't ever let it happen.'
'You can't patent a naturally occurring geneset,' said Blondie. 'I looked that up.'
'This boy ain't natural,' said Dogface. 'They did some stuff to the ubersoldaten. He's got maybe fifty per cent of the DNA he was born with, tops.'
Impulsively Blondie put his hand on Old Sam's arm. The skin was smooth and cool over hard muscle. There were little ridges of keloid scar tissue on his shoulder, radiating out from a central scar crater like a sunburst.
'Exit wound,' said Dogface.
'I thought the Martians used sound guns.'
Dogface grunted. 'The Greenies used anything they could get their hands on.'
It wasn't like that in the warvids. Even in the cheap exploitation pixs where you could sometimes see the join between the live action and computer-generated backgrounds. Blondie's generation had grown up on them, assimilating the soldier slang into everyday speech: Greenie, pop up, spider trap, fire mission, medevac.
'The bastard's nailed Paris.'
'Hey,' said Dogface. 'You gone off-line or what?'
'They always say that,' Blondie told him, 'And the wimpy one, you know the one that always gets scared on patrol, he goes berserk and does the mission and gets himself shot up and ...'
Dogface was staring at him.
'You,' he said slowly, 'have been watching too many vids.'
Lambada walked in from the crew room and stood at the foot of the bunk. 'You'd better wake this one up,' she said. 'Ming wants us up the Central Line doing integrity checks.'
'Is that where it went?' asked Blondie.
'Credit Card lost the trace just before Lowell Depot and we're getting some weird returns from the instrumentation on P-95.'
'What kind of weird?' asked Dogface. 'Weird weird or normal weird?'
'What can I say. Dogface?' said Lambada. 'Weird weird.'
'What about the real world?'
'Those fucks at KGB won't say much but they did confirm that a classified number of passengers got greased on the outbound Central Line platforms.'
'Did they say why the leftovers are blue?'
'Refraction index,' said Lambada. 'The stuff is made up of a saline solution saturated with some kind of crystals whose refraction index is blue - that's why the shit is blue.'
'What are the crystals made of?' asked Blondie.
'Mineral salts, calcium, traces of magnesium and potassium.'
'People,' said Dogface.
'And speaking of weird shit,' said Lambada,