So Vile a Sin by Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Orman Read Free Book Online

to little Thandiwe, deep in serious conversation with Mr Fact. She wondered how Roz Forrester was celebrating the New Year.
    Somewhere, out there.
    41
    Part One

    Iphigenia

    42

    1

    Fury, Aegisthus

    2 January 2982
    There was a smell to Fury; a familiar smell.
    It belonged to too many people and overloading life-support and the chemically tainted drizzle that precipitated from the dome above. It smelt of corruption and poverty and decay and violence, of backstreet deals and backstreet pleasures.
    Roz Forrester took a deep breath of it as she stepped out of the civilian transmat on the Piazza Tereshkova. It reminded her of home.
    The city crouched under its dome on the airless Zhongjian Plateau, surrounded by the black remnants of spoil heaps and the opencast pits that were visible from orbit. At night they cut non-shadows from the barely visible spectrum of Clytemnestra – the failed sun that squatted on Aegisthus’s tidally locked horizon.
    Like Kibero, thought Roz, remembering her father using his hands to explain the orbital dynamics of Jupiter’s moons – his face as the sun, his fists for Jupiter and Io. Sunrise came when the moon orbited out of the shadow of its primary and into the warmth of her father’s smile. Remembered, too, how an orbit like that made for long days, and longer nights.
    Agamemnon, the sun. Clytemnestra, the gas giant. Its moons, Aegisthus, where the military had their base; Orestes, the Ogrons’ homeworld, where the pitiful war dragged on; 43
    Electra and Iphigenia, empty rocks of no account.
    It was noisy daylight when she emerged from the transmat complex and into the piazza. She set off in a random direction, walking briskly to confuse any surveillance. If they were going to take her, it would be right there, outside the transmat, while she was still unarmed and dizzy from the reality shift.
    Piazza Tereshkova was an oval of parkland surrounded by corporate architecture going as high as the dome would allow, truncated versions of the towers that sprouted on every civilized world in the Empire. The company logos were picked out in good-quality daylight holograms, in a baroque font style that Roz associated with the fifties and the frontier assignments she’d pulled as a novice. Easy enough to put a spy eye or Kirlian sensor on a roof and cover the whole piazza.
    Pattern recognition.
    Assume that there had to be two thousand plus bodies in the piazza at any one time, way too much information for the smart bit of a sensor to process. It would have to be watching for patterns in the crowd, only keying into an individual that fell outside its parameters of normal behaviour.
    Like zigzagging around to flush out any surveillance.
    Roz kept on walking in a straight line until she fetched up against a table belonging to a Jeopard tisane bar, one of many that had spilt out over the walkway. She sat down, put her carryall on the chair beside her and shouted for some service. As if she’d planned on coffee all along.
    Act like you own the place, sayeth the Doctor.
    ‘I don’ sell gun, I sell frock only.’
    The stall was one of many that stood between the dying oak trees of the Boulevard Gagarin – a box of plasticized aluminium with an AG jack on each corner to hold it up. Lingerie was folded into neat stacks on the makeshift counter, the topmost garments unfolded with geometric precision to show silk linings, slashes and isometric triangles of imitation Martian lace. Satin gowns were pinned open like varicoloured butterflies against a makeshift plastic backboard.
    44
    Bras, garterbelts and bikini briefs hung from rails like a colony of ragged fishnet bats.
    ‘What you want gun for? Pretty human-looking lady like you.’
    Roz was sweating in the humidity, conscious of the press of the crowd at her back. ‘Business,’ she said.
    The stallholder was a Qink, a squat non-humanoid, asymmetric and five armed. A stumpy round brain case bobbed on the end of a muscular column protruding from its