‘Helping people.’ Lolo gestured around exuberantly. ‘Without people like him, people who care about others, where would we be?’
‘Breaking through the barriers the bastard Zangaris have built across the interstellar portals and getting offworld to where we’d be safe.’
‘Nowhere in the galaxy is safe from the Olyix.’
‘The exodus habitats will be. Not that we’ll ever make it there.’
‘We will,’ Lolo insisted. ‘Once you find Larson, we’ll have ourselves some real trading power.’
‘Oh, so now you want me to go after him?’
‘Don’t be such a trash king. I love you, Ollie. I’ve literally given you my life because I believe in you.’
Which wasn’t a responsibility Ollie had wanted at all. But he had to admit, for all hir stupid opinions and neurotic nerves and fragile mien, Lolo made this purgatory just about bearable. ‘I’ll find him. Don’t worry. I’m real close now.’
*
A couple of hours after the evening meal, Ollie pedalled up the north end of Rye Lane. The east side was taken up with a big old shopping centre that had been derelict for thirty years. Behind its boarded-up facade, it had been decaying sluggishly, attracting layers of gloffiti and moss while developers negotiated with the local council and the planning department over turning the big site into luxury apartments. Since the siege started and solnet commerce failed, traders had found their own use for it. Stalls had set up in the old shops – some no more than an over-optimistic kid sitting on a chair hawking a box of scavenged junk, while the more realistic merchants had metal-meshed kiosks and some tough fellas on either side to protect the commodities. By now Ollie had good relationships with several of them. He wheeled the bike up to Rebecca The-L, who was in her usual gothic black lace dress, with druid purple dreadlocks hanging down to her waist.
‘Davis,’ she drawled, ‘looking gooood.’
‘Not so trash yourself.’
‘You bring me some wholesome Ks?’
‘Very wholesome.’ Ollie took three quantum batteries out of the bike’s panniers.
Rebecca The-L’s nark-drifter smile lifted as she took them from him and slipped the first into a charge port on the kiosk. She let out a soft whistle of appreciation as she quickly read how many kilowatts he’d brought. ‘Impressive. Have you got a cable direct to Delta Pavonis?’
‘Something like that. So, are we in business?’
‘Davis, I appreciate quality, and you never fail me.’
‘You have them?’
She gestured to one of her tough fellas. He produced a small aluminium case from inside the kiosk and gave Ollie a disapproving look.
‘Go ahead,’ Rebecca The-L said as her dreamy composure returned.
Ollie slipped the catches and opened the lid a crack. Inside, two synth slugs the size of his little finger rested in protective foam, their dark skin glistening as if dusted with a sprinkling of tiny stars. Designed in some black lab using eight-letter DNA to craft unnatural components into their basic body, they had a bioprocessor cluster instead of a natural slug’s nerve cells. He told Tye, his altme, to ping them. Data splashed into his tarsus lens, confirming their functionality. ‘Be seeing you,’ he told her.
‘You don’t look dangerous, Davis. You have a pleasant face, guile-free. But it’s your eyes that give you away. When I look into them, I see only a depth that comes from darkness.’
‘Er, right. Catch you later.’ Ollie could feel Rebecca watching him as he wheeled his bike away. It took plenty of self-control not to look back.
The next kiosk belonged to Angus Ti, who claimed he traded whatever you wanted, but he didn’t have the kind of connections Rebecca The-L had. Ollie offered him a couple of quantum batteries he’d charged up from the kilns. ‘I don’t know where you keep getting electricity from,’ Angus said, ‘but this makes you my most valuable supplier.’
‘Happy to help. Now what are you offering?’
After a relatively good-natured haggle, he wound up with nine tubs of food pellets and a jumble of texture powders, plus a bag full of empty quantum batteries. ‘I get first refusal when they’re full,’ Angus said as he passed them over. ‘You know I give the best deals around.’
‘Sure thing.’ Ollie held his hand out. ‘So . . .’
Angus handed over the main event – a packet of zero-nark pads.
‘More like it.’ Ollie hadn’t used nark since the siege began, but Lolo hadn’t stopped. Sie had made an effort to cut down, but hir dependency was starting to worry Ollie. ‘Hey, can you throw in some duct tape, too?’
Angus gave him a calculating look, then produced a half-roll from under the counter. ‘You want anything else? My shoes? My girlfriend to bang?’
Laughing, Ollie grabbed the roll. ‘Tape’s fine. Be seeing you.’
‘Sure. What you want that for, anyway?’
‘Thought maybe I’d see if I’m into bondage.’
‘You take that shit easy, kid. People can get hurt.’
‘Thanks.’ Ollie turned away from the kiosk. ‘Voice of experience.’ He could guess the hand gesture Angus was making behind his back.
*
It took Ollie nearly an hour to cycle from Rye Lane up to Dulwich; these days the clear path was anything but. Two years on and still nobody had moved the broken taxez and cabez and bagez that cluttered the concrete, and now it was getting worse as people started tipping their rubbish wherever they felt like. And of course most of his route seemed to be uphill, leaving him sweating heavily, which was going to play hell with his face again. He’d never even thought about Connexion’s London metrohub network in any of the time before; it just was. Now, distance had become achingly real again – a handicap of effort, sweat and time. As he pedalled away with straining legs, all he could think about was stepping onto his old boardez and rolling along effortlessly one last time. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have the electricity to power it up again, but that kind of profligacy would draw way too much attention.
He reached the end of Lordship Lane and turned west onto the A205. The road cut through sports pitches
