The man at the far end of the bar stood up. “That’ll be me then.” He was slim, taller than Adam, with a narrow face that carried suspicion easily. Adam guessed he was a first-lifer; his head was almost bald, with just a thin monk’s ring of graying hair. His clothes were those of an ordinary workingman: jeans, and a checked shirt, with a fleece jacket worn open, a woolly hat stuffed into one pocket. They were all streaked with dirt, as if he’d come straight from the factory or yard. But the way he looked at Adam—the assessment he carried out in a glance—marked him out as a leader.
“Huw North,” Adam said as they shook hands. “One of my colleagues was here last week.”
“Not sure if I remember,” Nigel Murphy said.
“He said you were the man to talk to.”
“Depends what you want to talk about … comrade.”
Adam held in a sigh. He’d been through this same ritual so many times over the years. By now he really ought to have worked out how to circumvent the bullshit and get right down to business. But as always, it had to be played out. The local man had to be proved top dog in front of his friends.
“I have a few issues,” Adam said. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“You’re very free with your money there, comrade,” said one of the others sitting behind Nigel Murphy. “Got a lot of it, have you? Thinking you can buy our friendship?”
Adam smiled thinly at the barfly. “I don’t want your friendship, and you certainly don’t want to be a friend of mine.”
The man grinned around at his colleagues. His appearance was mid-thirties, and he had the kind of brashness that suggested that was his genuine age, a first-lifer. “Why’s that?”
“Who are you?”
“Sabbah. What’s it to you?”
“Well, Sabbah. If you were my friend, you’d be stalked across the Commonwealth, and when they caught you, you’d die. Permanently.”
Nobody in the bar was smiling anymore. Adam was glad of the small heavy bulge in his jacket produced by the ion pistol.
“Any of you remember November 21, 2344?” Adam looked around challengingly.
“Abadan station,” Nigel Murphy said quietly.
“That was you?” Sabbah asked.
“Let’s just say I was in the region at the time.”
“Four hundred and eighty people killed,” Murphy said. “A third of them total deaths. Children who were too young to have memorycell inserts.”
“The train was late,” Adam said. His throat was dry as he remembered the events. They were still terribly clear. He’d never had a memory edit, never taken the easy way out. Live with the consequences of your actions. So every night he dreamed of the explosion and derailment just in front of the gateway, carriages plunging across junctions and parallel rails in the busiest section of the station. Fifteen trains hit, sideshunted, crashing, bursting apart, exploding, spewing out radioactive elements. And bodies. “It was on the wrong section of track at the wrong time. My chapter was after the Kilburn grain train.”
“You wanted to stop people from eating?” Sabbah asked sneeringly.
“Is this a drinking den or a Socialist chapter? Don’t you know anything about the Party you support? The reason we exist? There are certain types of grain trains which are specially designed to go through zero-end gateways. CST don’t tell people about those trains, same way as they don’t mention zero-end. The company spent millions designing wagons which can function in freefall and a vacuum. Millions of dollars developing machinery whose only job is to dump their contents into space. They go through a zero-end gateway onto a line of track that’s just hanging there in the middle of interstellar space. Nobody knows where. It doesn’t matter, they exist so that we can safely dump anything harmful away from H-congruous planets. So they send the trains with their special wagons through and open the hatches to expel their contents. Except there’s nothing physically dangerous about the grain. It’s just tens of thousands of tons of perfectly good grain streaming out into the void. There’s another clever mechanism built into the wagons to make sure of that. Just opening the hatch isn’t good enough. In freefall the grain will simply sit there, it has to be physically pushed out. And do you know why they do it?”
“The market,” Nigel Murphy said with a hint of weariness.
“Damn right: the market. If there’s ever a glut of food, the prices go down. Commodity traders can’t have that; they can’t sell at enough profit to pay for the gamble they’ve made on the work of others, so the market demands less food to go around. The grain trains roll through the zero-end gateways, and people pay higher prices for basic food. Any society which allows that to happen is fundamentally wrong. And grain is just the tiniest part of the abuse people are subject to thanks to the capitalist market economy.” Adam stared hard at Sabbah, knowing that once again he was going too far, making too much of an issue out of his own commitment. He didn’t care; this was what he’d devoted himself to. Even now, with all his other priorities, the greater human cause still fueled him. “That’s why I joined this Party, to end that kind of monstrous injustice. That’s why I’ve committed my life to this Party. And that’s why I’ll die, a total death, a member of this Party. Because I believe the human race deserves better than those bastard plutocrats running us like some private fiefdom. How about you, sonny? What do you believe in?”
“Thanks for clearing that up,” Nigel Murphy said hurriedly. He stood between Adam and Sabbah. “All of us here are good members of the Party, Huw. We might have joined for different reasons, but we have the same aims.” With one hand he signaled Sabbah and the others to stay at the bar. His other arm pressed lightly on Adam’s shoulder, steering him toward a small door. “Let’s talk.”
The back room was used to store beer crates and all the other junk that a bar generates down the years. A single polyphoto strip was fixed to the ceiling, providing illumination. When the door was closed, Adam’s e-butler informed him its access to the cybersphere had been severed.
“Sorry about that,” Nigel Murphy said as they pulled out a couple of empty beer crates to sit on. “The comrades aren’t used to new faces around here.”
“You mean the Party’s a lost cause on Velaines?”
Nigel Murphy nodded reluctantly. “It seems that way some days. We barely scrape two percent in elections now, and a lot of those are simply protest votes against the major parties. Any direct action we take against the companies is so … I don’t know. Puerile? It’s like we’re hitting a planet with a rubber hammer, we’re not causing any damage. And there’s always the risk of another mistake like Abadan. Socialism isn’t about killing people, after all. It’s supposed to be about justice.”
“I know. It’s hard, believe me. And I’ve been working for the cause a lot longer than you. But you have to believe that someday all this will change. The Commonwealth today is based on pure imperialist expansion. That’s always the most favorable time for market economics because there are always new markets opening. But it will ultimately fail. The expansion into phase three space is nothing like as fast and aggressive as the first and second phases were. The whole process is slowing. Eventually this madness will stop and we can start to focus our resources toward genuine social growth instead of physical.”
“Let’s hope so.” Nigel Murphy raised his beer bottle. “So what can I do for you?”
“I need to speak to some people. I’m looking to buy weapons hardware.”
“Still blowing up grain trains, huh?”
“Yeah.” Adam forced a smile. “Still blowing up grain trains. Can you set that up for me?”
“I can try. I’ve bought a few small pieces myself over the years.”
“I’m not looking for small pieces.”
“The dealer I use, she should be able to help. I’ll ask.”
“Thank you.”
“What kind of hardware are we talking about, exactly?”
Adam handed over a hard copy of the list. “The deal is this; you can add on whatever t
his chapter needs up to ten percent of the total price. Think of it as a finder’s fee.”
“This is some very serious hardware.”
“I represent a very serious chapter.”
“All right then.” Nigel Murphy still couldn’t quite banish the troubled expression from his face as he read down the list. “Give me your e-butler access code. I’ll call when I’ve set up the meeting.”
“Good. One thing, have you had any new members join recently? The last couple of months or so?”
“No. Not for about nine months now, unfortunately. I told you, we’re not very fashionable at the moment. We’re going to mount another recruitment drive in the general workers unions. But that won’t be for weeks yet. Why?”
“Just checking.”
Sabbah hated himself for what he was doing. The comrade was obviously well connected in the Party, probably in the executive cadre. Which meant he truly believed in what he was doing, especially if he’d been truthful about the grain train.
It wasn’t that Sabbah didn’t believe in their cause. He absolutely hated the way everyone else in the world seemed to be doing better than he was, that his background had condemned him to one life lived badly. The way society was structured prevented him from bettering himself. That was what attracted him to the Socialists in the first place, the way they were working to change things so that people like him would get a chance to live decently in an inclusive world.
All of which only made this worse. The comrade was actively working to bring down the companies and the plutocratic state that supported them. Which was a lot more than Sabbah ever seemed to do. All the seventh chapter did was hold endless meetings where they argued among themselves for what seemed like hours. Then there was the canvassing, days spent being abused, insulted, and treated with utter contempt by the very people they were trying to help. And of course the protests outside company offices and factories, ambushing politicians. Sabbah had lost count of how many times he’d been on the wrong, and very painful, end of a police shockwhip. The real reason he kept going these days was because of the rest of the chapter. He didn’t have many friends outside, not anymore.
But he didn’t have any choice. Not in this.
It was nine years ago when he met the woman. The job that night had been so easy it would have been criminal not to do it. He’d gone along with a couple of old mates he’d known back from his gang years, when they’d all pulled a tru from the reform academy to run the streets. Their quarry was a delivery truck that made a nightly run from the CST planetary station to various local wholesale warehouses about town. It was carrying crates of domestic goods from Augusta, all high quality. And the van was old, its alarm a joke.
Thanks to some decent targeted kaos software bought from a contact they’d managed to intercept the van and lift its load clean within ten minutes. Sabbah even took a couple of maidbots with him when he went home in addition to his cut.
She was waiting for him when he walked through the door: a middle-aged woman with mild Asian features, her shoulder-length raven hair flecked with gray strands, wearing a smart business suit. Sitting in his living room, looking like she belonged in that dingy two-room apartment more than he ever did.
“You now have a choice,” she said as his mouth was gaping open in surprise. “Either I’ll shoot you in self-defense, because you were assaulting a government official in the pursuit of her duties, or we make a deal and I’ll let you keep your dick.”
“Whoo …” Sabbah frowned at his door, silently cursing its alarm circuit for not warning him she’d broken in.
“Or do you believe the Velaines public medical insurance scheme will pay for a new dick, Sabbah? That’s where I’m aiming, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
In horror he saw she had some kind of small black metal tube in her hand, and it really was leveled at his groin. He shifted the boxes containing the maidbots, gradually lowering them until they covered his hips and the hugely valuable personal organ situated there.
“If you’re police, you won’t—”
The violent crack that her weapon produced made him cower. Scraps of foam packaging drifted through the air while the remnants of the maidbot dropped to the floor. The little machine’s crablike electromuscle limbs spasmed for a while before collapsing limply. Sabbah stared at it. “Oh, Christ on a crutch,” he whispered. He gripped the remaining box even tighter.
“Do we now know where we both stand?” the policewoman asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All I want is for you to do something for me. A small thing. Will you do that?”
“What?”
“One day someone will turn up at your chapter, and I want to know about it. I can’t give you his name, he changes it every time. But he’ll be looking to buy things, weapons most likely, or kaos software, or samples of diseases, or components with the wrong specifications which will screw up whatever they’re installed in. That’s the kind of person he is. A very unpleasant individual. He’ll claim to be a Party member, to be doing what he does for a noble cause. But he’s lying. He’s a terrorist. An anarchist. A murderer. So I want you to tell me when he visits you. Okay?”
Sabbah didn’t like to think of the alternative. She was still pointing the weapon right at him, aiming low. “Yeah, sure. I’ll do that.”
“Good.”
“When’s he coming?”
“I don’t know. It might be tomorrow. It might be in thirty years’ time. It might be never. Or I might have caught him before he ever reaches Velaines.”
“Uh, right, okay.”
“Now turn around.”
“What?”
“You heard.” She got to her feet, the little weapon still pointing at him. Sabbah reluctantly turned to face the door. His hands were grabbed, forcing him to drop the maidbot box. A cold band of malmetal coiled around his wrists immobilizing them. “What the hell …”
“You’re under arrest for theft.”
“You’ve got to be fucking joking! I said I’d help you. That was the deal.” He turned his head to try to look at her. The weapon was jabbed into his jaw.
“There is no deal. You made a choice.”
“That was the deal!” he yelled furiously. “I help you, you get me off this rap. Jesus!”
“You are mistaken,” she said relentlessly. “I didn’t say that. You committed a crime. You must face the consequences. You must be brought to justice.”
“Fuck you, bitch. Fuck you. I hope your terrorist blows up a hundred hospitals, and schools. I hope he wipes out your whole planet.”
“He won’t. He’s only interested in one planet. And with your help, we can stop him from damaging it further.”
“My help?” The word came out as a squeak he was so shocked. “You stupid bitch, you can suck me and I’d never help you now. We had a deal.”
“Very well. I will lodge a plea with the judge, asking him for leniency.”
“Huh?” This was so weird it was doing his head in. Right from the start the woman scared him. He wasn’t even sure she was a policewoman anymore. More like a serial killer.
“I will tell him you cooperated fully, and agreed to be my informer. The file will not be encrypted when it is attached to your court record. Do you think your friends will access it when they see you receiving a light sentence? Will they be happy about what it says? My colleagues have already arrested them for tonight’s robbery, by the way. I expect they’ll be curious about how we knew.”
“Oh, goddamn.” Sabbah was near to tears. He wanted this whole nightmare to end. “You can’t do that to me. They’ll kill me, a total death. You don’t know what they’re like.”
“I think I do. Now, are you going to tell me when my target turns up?”
So through clenched teeth he said, “Yes.”
And that had been the way of it for nine years. He’d been given a suspended jail term for the robbery, and made to perform two hundred hours’ citizen service. It was the last time he’d done a job�
��well, anything major, anyway, just the occasional rip off.
And every three weeks there would be a message in his e-butler’s hold file asking him if the man had come. Every time he replied no.
Nine years, and that superbitch had never let it go. “Time,” she’d told him on the way to the police station, “lessens nothing.” She’d never said what would happen if he didn’t tell her. But then, it wasn’t something he wanted to find out.
So Sabbah walked for several blocks, leaving the chapter house behind. That way his e-butler would be operating through a cybersphere node that wasn’t anywhere near the building. The chapter had several tech-types; heavily idealistic about total access they all sailed close to anarchistic beliefs, believing all information should be free. They also smoked things they shouldn’t and played sensory immersion games for most of their waking hours. But they did have an unnerving habit of delivering the goods when databanks had to be cracked for the cause. Sabbah wouldn’t put it past the Party’s senior cadre to mount a simple surveillance operation around the chapter building.
His e-butler entered the code she’d given him. The connection was placed immediately, which was unnerving if not entirely surprising. Sabbah took a deep breath. “He’s here.”
Adam Elvin took his time in the lobby of the Scarred Suit club while the hostess dealt with his coat. His retinal inserts adapted to the low lighting easily enough, bringing up an infrared profiling that banished shadows for him. But he wanted a moment to take in the whole scene. As clubs went it was pretty standard; booths around the wall, each with an e-seal curtain for privacy, tables and chairs on the main floor, a long bar with an extensive number of bottles on the shelves, and a small stage where the boys, girls, and ladyboys of the Sunset Angels troupe danced. The lighting was low, with topaz and purple spots casting their shady beams onto the dark wood of the fittings. The music was loud, a drab software synth that kept up a constant beat for the performers to remove their clothes to. There was more money in here than there should have been, he thought. That made it protected.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 5