Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [147]
‘You’re the one who’s playing games,’ he said bitterly.
Tears leaked from her eyes and her shoulders quaked.
‘Breathe OK?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
He moved behind Cat and opened the door. They backed out and walked quickly to the exit. Debbie Jones leapt up from her seat.
‘What’s going on?’ she demanded.
Jordan hesitated. Debbie turned away from him and pointed to the screen. Mandelbrot snowflakes drifted across it, faded, and died to a dot.
‘System crash,’ Jordan said, thinking on his feet. ‘Mrs Lawson’s trying to fix it. She’s a bit caught up in it but she’d like to see you in about ten minutes. Some files I left lying about,’ he added in a vaguely apologetic tone. ‘See you around.’
He followed Cat out, aware that Debbie was still standing and watching them with the expression of someone who just knows they’ve missed something, but…
‘That stuff about Donovan,’ Cat said as they left the office. ‘D’you think that’s what she thought?’
‘Could be,’ Jordan said. ‘Or a bit of disinformation. She’s an expert at it.’
‘And why did she mention Moh?’
Jordan stood still. The question was nagging at him. How had she connected him with Moh? Then he remembered.
‘She didn’t say Moh, she said Kohn. Maybe she meant Josh Kohn, she’s old enough to know about him and the Plan, and she knew I’d done something on the Plan.’
‘Yeah, he has a reputation,’ Cat said. ‘But how did she guess who I was?’
Jordan grinned. The answer seemed obvious after his trawls through the net. ‘You’ve got a reputation, too!’
Jordan began to descend the stairs backwards, holding the rail with one hand and reaching the other towards Cat.
‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,’ she said.
She returned to the top and slid her thumbs deftly around her waist, then shoved down hard on her skirt. With a rending noise it came away from the bodice. She stepped out of the collapsing structure.
‘Velcro,’ she explained. ‘Gimme my jacket.’
Jordan took it from the bag and felt a sudden impulse to be free himself. He scrambled out of the suit and into his jeans as Cat did something arcane with the crinoline frame, folding and telescoping it to flat quarter-circles, making it and the skirts vanish into the bag. (How do they do these things? he wondered. Where do they learn them? And what are the military applications?).
He looked at her, tall boots and short guns, tight jeans, bodice tucked into them like a fancy fitted shirt under the big jacket. She put one hip forward and held a fist to it.
‘Calamity Jane rides again,’ she said.
‘Minor detail,’ said Jordan, glancing down the stairs. ‘The guard. Unless you’re going for the final shot of Butch and Sundance.’
‘Nah,’ she sneered. She passed him one of the side-arms and signed to him to follow her down the steps. At the foot they crept to the door and flattened against the wall. Cat reached out and very slowly turned the knob and inched the door open, then let it swing inwards.
There was a rush of noise. Cat waited for a moment and risked a look around the jamb. She laughed and stepped into the doorway. The Warrior had left, and in the street there was…
‘A multitude,’ Jordan said.
Bleibtreu-Fèvre had found an antique CRT buried among the vast arrays of screens. On experimenting with it he discovered it was a television. It picked up only four channels, none of which showed anything but ballet or marching bands. The old state broadcasting system, responding to a crisis of the state in the time-honoured fashion. He flicked idly between Les Sylphides and the 2039 Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
He felt exhausted, burnt-out on anti-som, fatalistic. They were doomed. He had worked with Donovan all night, helping as best he could while the old crank honed and refined his hunter-killer viruses, repeatedly launching them with high hopes only to see them snuffed out by Melody Lawson’s diabolically effective countermeasures.
With