Astrid ran into her bedroom, the site of so much sexual frustration and insomnia, and didn’t bother closing the flat’s main door. Her bed, with its duvet cover and pillowcases of multicolored harlequin diamonds, was made as tidily and tight as a birthday box.
A private taxiglider, or cabcab, as they were called, was still idling outside with its “path-manager” onboard. (Path-managers usually controlled several satellite cabcabs at once while driving “control” cabcabs themselves capable of transporting passengers.)
Astrid’s bedroom, crassly lit, also reeking of paint solvents, possessed none of the contemporary furniture of the sitting room. There was the old pine double bed with large blond posts and a battered oak dresser she’d had since she was fifteen. On the dresser was a small shrine of fotolives of her mum, mostly as a child, and her old five-decade rosary, curled and dead as a crushed snake. She picked it up, rubbed a pearl a few times, and slipped it into her pocket.
She opened her closet to a neat array of pressed, white regulation shirts, each still in its plastic sleeve from the cleaner’s. She chose one randomly and carefully slipped the shirt out of the plastic protector. I’m going too slow, she said to herself. Too slow! She began to strip as fast as she could then, kicking her shoes and trousers off, hopping around on one leg. She changed into a more comfortable, M&S “living support” bra (its cultured bio-fibers gently tightened with exertion or softened with rest). She jerked her police uniform on in less than a minute and gave herself a quick look. She often felt vulnerable before the mirror, but not now. She raised her heavy, dark brows and smiled sympathetically, as if trying to encourage someone trying something new without a hope of pulling it off.
Shoes! She sat on her bed and tugged on an old but still polished pair of black service shoes. She brushed a few filaments of lint off her black trousers. She set her women’s police trilby on her head and then took it off—being an inspector gave her the privilege of not needing to wear it. She brushed her long black hair and put it back in its tie. Then she put her silly trilby back on, feeling a fool. During regular hours, outside the office she was supposed to wear a protective vest with Kevlar4 inserts, but like other officers, she kept hers at the “ranch,” which is what her colleagues called the RPC police station in Old Police House at Hyde Park. She put on a slick black jacket and stood at attention.
She faced the mirror again, arms akimbo, putting on a haughty little slouch. She looked sharp, she knew, about as sharp as she ever got. Her high cheekbones, her brunette sleekness, her nearly black-brown eyes—they all gave her a mink-like appearance, hard and gorgeous, washed for years by the fast icy rivers of Mount Bitch.
It’s still good, this, she thought. In the kit, Flōter or not, she was It. She felt safe from relapse, at least for a while.
“You need more uniforms,” she said to the mirror. She already owned two dozen identical shirts, but she could never have too many. “And fuck what anyone else says,” she whispered.
Lastly, she went back to her dresser and pulled out the top drawer. Her neuralzinger rested on a neat stack of black silk panties. In Texas, she’d had a single triangular rhinestone jewelered onto the stock, just on one side. It gleamed with icy sadism. She flipped open the chamber. Loaded with living gangliatoxic nets—the most dangerous rounds allowed by nonfirearm specialists in Britain. She slipped the gun into her trouser pocket.
jackals in the headlamps
WHEN ASTRID SCUTTLED BACK TO THE TAXIGLIDER, the path-manager said, through the video panel on a bulletproof clear divider, “No charge, free ride, all the way.” The path-manager was smiling, craning his head around at Astrid, then looking back at something on his monitors, moving his long fingers over holo-controls with a flurrying grace. He seemed nervous, with something that went beyond even the stress of his Indigent job. Astrid hadn’t looked at him very closely before but now took him in. He wore a navy down puffy vest over an old wool jumper with ragged cuffs. His eyes were almond-shaped and close together, and he had thick eyebrows and bushy hair.
“I need to go fast,” said Astrid.
She wanted to make small talk with the path-manager, but she thought this would make the man more tense. He faded from the video screen. Unlike some officers, Parkies possessed no policing powers outside the parks, but Indigents always saw the law as an extension of the hated Red Watch. Astrid wished she could explain this, perhaps put the man at ease. But she felt uneasy. As a woman officer, she’d had her share of being called a “plonk” or worse by colleagues, and a little part of her didn’t mind feeling the man’s deference.
“It’s a quiet night,” said Astrid.