A Room Of One’s Own

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Notes: First line (and various other bits) stolen shamelessly from William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”. Thanks to xjestx for super-quick beta.

The sky over Portsmouth harbour was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel. Masts, tethered by monofilament stays, clustered like antennae, and the ships’ rigging robots crawled around through the spars like so many spiders.

I looked away from the moorings and gave my attention to the street. You live here, now, I reminded myself, as I did daily. I pushed through the crush of bodies, sailors on leave and whores out to take them for all they had and the multitude of others who lived on the crumbs left by the navy: arms dealers, victuallers, virus-makers, the usual suspects. The war meant that business was booming, and everyone was here to hustle.

The Lamb was relatively quiet at this time of day, though. The door buzzed open and I ducked inside. Bush was behind the bar, as usual, lit blue and red by the holographic Union Jack above his head. He limped over to pour me a drink, servos in his leg whining.

“Horatio.” he said with a lopsided grin. “It’s good to see you.”

I sat down at the bar. “You too.”

“A couple of the Admiral’s men were in here looking for you.”

Shit. I shrugged, making it nonchalant. “Did you tell them to go to hell?”

“Yeah.”

The beer tasted of nothing and sat sour in my stomach. Three years, now, since Kingston, and I was done with all that. Dead and gone.

Bush stacked glasses and looked at me sideways along the bar. “You look like death. You sleeping?”

“Working.”

He looked around at the other customers: a couple of midshipmen, interface scars still fresh, getting steadily wasted; a few tired whores; a man in a black jacket visibly shivering as he talked into his phone. “Look,” Bush said, “Orrock will be in soon. He can look after this lot. You want to –” He jerked his head in the direction of the back door, and the little room he had back there.

I shook my head. “Thanks, William,” I said, and meant it, but I couldn’t go back there with him, not now. I pushed my stool back from the bar, leaving my beer half finished.

“Wait.” Bush reached inside his jacket and took out a little bag, two blue tablets nestled in the corner of the clear plastic. He held them out to me. “Get some rest.”

I took them from his hand, the first touch of skin I’d felt in weeks, and felt one corner of my mouth quirk up as I said, “Yeah. Sure.”

My lodgings were up a hill, an ugly square box covered with solar panelling. Inside was a rat’s nest of walkways and stairs leading to each of the rooms. It was home, for now, and even the little booth I had there was bigger than what I’d once been used to.

The front hall was bathed in jittering fluorescent light and the noise of the all-hours soap opera that Mrs Mason favoured. She hardly looked at me as I came in, but spoke without taking her eyes from the screen. “You owe a week’s rent.”

“Ah,” I said, fumbling around unconvincingly, patting my pockets. My last twenty had gone three days ago. I pulled out a handful of junk, old locker tickets and bits of aluminium foil. The little plastic bag and its blue pills caught Mrs Mason’s eye. I shrugged and handed them over without a word, and went upstairs.

I hadn’t come back to sleep, anyway. I’d been turning over the fact that the Admiral wanted to see me. Admiral Pellew — the last man I wanted to see, but he’d be difficult to refuse. I figured I could expect some kind of press gang, and I was going to be prepared. I still had my dress sword. God knows why I hadn’t pawned it; I’d been close enough to rock bottom a couple of times that I’d even considered getting my interface cut out and selling it, but the sword and the hat I’d kept, stowed in a dented metal footlocker. I pressed my thumb on the lock to open it, hearing the bolt slide back with a click. When I lifted the sword out it felt heavy and unaccustomed in my hands.

I strapped the belt around my hips. Not much good against tasers or sedative darts, but marginally better than nothing.

It was time to be going. Pellew would know where I lived, without a doubt. The street was the place to be: plenty of places to hide, plenty of directions to move. I kept a hand on the hilt of my sword and tried to tell if anyone was following me. Hard to know; paranoia came too easily. I stopped to look in the window of one of the brothels, where girls danced to pay off the fortune in surgery that had got them that way. The glass was slanted, and I could see a reflection of the street in it. The girls knew I wasn’t paying attention and they tried to distract me, gyrating and bending over in front of me, but I’d seen what I needed to: four men, about fifty metres away, spread out across the road as if they were just randomly walking in the same direction. I could tell by the roll of their gait that they were seamen, and from the way they looked everywhere but directly at me I knew they had to be Pellew’s press gang.

I walked into the brothel like I’d meant to all along. The minute the door slid shut behind me I ducked under the bouncer’s arm and darted inside, looking around to see where the other exit was. I knew there’d be one — it was pretty much part of the definition of a Portsmouth brothel that it had to had a quick exit out back — and I found it down a flight of damp stairs and through an alcove piled high with plastic drums. I could hear voices raised behind me, women’s and men’s, but there was nobody right on my tail.

The door jarred against something as I pushed, so I set my shoulder against it and shoved harder. I found myself stumbling out into an alleyway, and more of the same plastic drums rolled on the cobbles, pale in the darkness. I didn’t even see the guy who got me. I felt the dart first, hitting my shoulder, and I felt myself weakening even as I reached for it. Next thing I knew I was lying on my back, vision darkening, and the blurry shape of my assailant looming over me.

I woke up with a blinding headache and a numb sensation in my shoulder. I sat up as quickly as I could and looked around, half expecting to see Pellew sitting there beside me. He wasn’t. There wasn’t anyone else, either, just the bed I was lying in and a pile of other furniture that must have cost a fortune on the black market. Wooden panelling on the walls, for God’s sake — that stuff was as rare as petroleum, and just as illegal.

I suppose it was ten or fifteen minutes before I got tired of waiting. The door opened easily, and there were no guards in the hallway. I thought I could make out the pinprick glitter of a camera nestled in a fold of the woodwork, though, but I wasn’t sure.

Another door at the other end of the hall. I took a deep breath and walked into the room. The Admiral sat at a table, a decanter of port by his hand. “Will you take a seat?” he asked.

I figured I could stay standing if I wanted to, but my head was still throbbing and I couldn’t quite see the point of it. He had me here now, and I knew him well enough to know that he only had to speak to have me doing what he wanted. That’s why I’d avoided him so long, after all. No point now. I sat down.

He poured a glass of port for me and handed it across the table. I sipped reluctantly at first, but it helped clear my head, so I finished the glass in about two gulps.

Putting the glass down firmly on the table, I looked straight at him. “I don’t sail any more,” I said.

“I’m aware of that,” said Pellew. “I thought I might convince you to return.”

“Will you make me?” He probably could, if he wanted to, and I wanted to know whether I’d have at least the appearance of a choice in the matter.

“No.”

A silence hung between us for a moment, then he stood and moved to the sideboard. He picked up a wide printout and contemplated it, then laid it on the table in front of me. I looked at it, making out the lines and legends scattered across the paper. My stomach turned over, and I came close to pushing over the chair and making a run for it, but I managed to hold still and catch my breath.

“Quiberon,” I said around the lump in my throat. “Again?”

He nodded. “A convoy of coolant transports.”

Rich pickings, then; the government would love to get their hands on some of that. Prize money, too. I didn’t care about that. “What’s in it for me?”

Pellew had been turning a memory chip over and over between his fingers, and now he picked up a deck from the sideboard, put it on the table, and slotted the chip into place. He handed me the interface cord. “This,” he said.

“What is it?”

He shook his head, and I thought he wasn’t going to tell me at all, but then he relented. “Reparation,” he said. I figured I was just going to have to plug it in and see.

I was half surprised the interface hadn’t rusted over. Three years, and I half expected the contact to hurt, like reopening a wound. But it slid in clean and cold, and I gasped, feeling the world drop away and dark light swallow me.

It looked like a standard quarterdeck program at first — navigation, gunnery, tactics and strategy — but something was different. A nagging feeling behind me, as if someone was watching over my shoulder, and a sense of — I struggled to categorise it, then remembered what it reminded me of: a grey market Spanish AI I’d interfaced with at Gibraltar.

The visuals were just as usual: binnacle directly in front, with navigation displays that rose to my thoughts; rigging laid out beyond that with meteorological data superimposed; gunnery to the side, showing ammunition graphs and range calculations. I turned a little more, still feeling the sensation that someone was behind me, but the interface only permitted 180 degrees of movement and obligingly popped up a rear-view HUD instead. Nothing, nobody.

I shook my head and turned back again. One by one I probed at the systems, like trying to find a sore tooth.

It was a whisper at first, on the edge of hearing, but I knew the sound of it. I felt suddenly cold, then hot. Then it came stronger, and spoke my name.

I gasped. “Archie?”

“Yes, Horatio.”

I could hear him smiling, feel his joy, all tied up and tangled in my own. Damn Pellew! I laughed out loud. “Archie,” I said, my heart feeling like it was going to burst, “We’re going back to Quiberon.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Non-explicit, Hornblower, Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.