Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [17]
‘…don’t need this. Nobody does this to me, nobody gives me this kind of aggravation. Not if they want to live.’ He inhaled noisily, obviously wearing a throat-mike. He looked her straight in the eyes, a remarkable feat considering how he was patching the projections together and probably viewing her through the grainy line-feed of a security camera somewhere up in a corner of the ceiling.
‘Well, Miss Duvalier,’ he said, visibly calming down, ‘we can’t let this insult pass unchallenged.’
She nodded quickly. Her mouth was too dry for speech.
‘D’you have anything on the bastard? Not his codes – I’ve picked them up already from the hostage claim last night, and I’m working on that. But where does he hang out in Actual Reality, eh?’
Cat swallowed hard. ‘I just want this matter settled,’ she said. ‘Not to start a feud.’
‘I was thinking in terms of a legal challenge,’ Donovan said. ‘Releasing you without demanding ransom is so far out of line that it’d be a very painful challenge for him to meet. I would like to present it to him in as public a manner as possible.’
‘You’ll find him hard to trace in the nets,’ Cat said. She saw Donovan begin to bristle. ‘But,’ she went on hastily, ‘I can tell you his usual haunts.’
The CLA leader listened to her, then said, ‘Thank you, Miss Duvalier. And now, you would be well advised to do your best to disappear. I’ll be in touch.’
‘How will you—?’ she began, but Donovan had vanished.
Screen and phones filled again with the jackhammer beat of Babies With Rabies.
The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers’ Defence Collective rented a unit in one of the student accommodation blocks, and for now it was Kohn’s place. Bed and desk and terminal, cupboard, shelves, fridge, kettle. Door so flimsy it wasn’t worth locking. Moh had painted a hammer-and-sickle-and-4 on it, and it worked like charms, like wreaths of garlic, like silver crosses and holy water don’t.
He called up the collective on the open phone and left a message that he was off-active and looking forward to some good music when he came home. In their constantly shuffled slangy codes, ‘music’ currently meant party, ‘good music’ meant some heavy political problem had come down. He pacified the ravenous cravings that usually followed marijuana with a coffee, biscuits and a tobacco cigarette. A week of night shifts and his circadian rhythms were shot. And any day or week or month now he could be trying to deal with not one but two insurrections. One of which would target sites he and his company were paid to protect.
Once he would have welcomed both. Now, the thought of yet another of the ANR’s notorious ‘final’ offensives filled him only with a weary dismay, for all that he wished them well. Still theoretically a citizen of the Republic, true-born son of England and so on and so forth, Kohn had what he considered a sober grasp of the ANR’s chances. On any scale of political realism they’d be registered by a needle twitching at the bottom end of the dial.
As for the other lot, the Left Alliance…Their only chance lay in the remote possibility of detonating the kind of social explosion which they had discounted in advance by the alliances they’d made – with the cranks, the greens, the barbarians, the whole rabble that everyone with a glimmer of sense lumped together as the barb. Socialism and barbarism. Some factions of the old party, fragments of old man Trotsky’s endlessly twisting and recombining junk DNA, were in the Alliance, just like they were in all the other movements: lost cause and effect of a forgotten history that had taken too many wrong turnings ever to find its way back. Nothing left for him now but to fight a rearguard action, to hold back the multiplying divisions of the night, where red and green showed the same false colours in the dark.
Good music.
He thought about Cat, how nearly he had come