Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped.

  But villains are oversimplifications.

  Soq

  I’m impressed,” Podlove said, with a slight wobble to his voice, as the new arrivals closed in on him. He’s terrified, Soq saw. Desperate. “I expected your people would try to blunder in here. But I didn’t think you were capable of somehow crashing my lobby’s defenses.”

  “Both are surprises,” Go said, furious, confused, frightened. To Ora and Kaev and Masaaraq and the polar bear she said, “I told you to stay on the ship.”

  Podlove’s lips were tight. “Right. You didn’t get my grandson killed. You didn’t tell them to come here. Terrible things keep happening to me, with you standing right next to them, but it’s never your fault.”

  Soq looked back and forth between Go and Podlove. Comparing. Wondering: Which is more fit to rule? Which is more villainous? They were both frightened. Both sweating. Barron, at least, was relaxed, or that’s how it seemed. Tough to tell with a sack over his head. His posture and general vibe of chill indicated a lack of fear.

  On a sloop across from the Salt Cave, someone had spray painted BLACKFISH CITY.

  “We didn’t crash your defenses,” Soq said, earning a death glare from Go. “You did. You ran that barbarian software against itself, and that’s what’s fucking you up. And most of the city, I’d imagine.”

  “How did you get it from him, I wonder?” Podlove said. “My poor dead grandson. Did you torture it out of him? No. He’d probably have given it to you willingly. You’re just his type. Feral and filthy and frea—”

  Soq laughed. “Don’t be childish.” That had the desired effect. Pointing out when octogenarians are behaving like children is usually a good way to shut them up.

  The soft putty of Go’s face was hardening. Soq watched her slowly come to accept that the situation was out of her control. While the sensation was clearly agony for Go, for Soq it felt . . . expansive. Full of potential. Terrifying, but also thick with magnificent possible outcomes. Soq knew how the miserable poor of Mexico City or Pretoria might have felt watching the rebel armies march through the streets, or Lisbon or Copenhagen when the waters came flooding in. For once, the status quo is fragile. Things could change.

  “And our new arrivals?” Podlove said, turning to the very tiny angry mob. “Surely you didn’t come all this way just to stand there glaring at me.”

  Ora stepped forward. “Do you know who I am?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, ma’am.”

  She said her full name. His expression did not change. No recognition, no deceit flickered in his eyes. He really doesn’t know, Soq thought.

  A groan from underneath them. The building at war with itself. A digital autoimmune disease. “We should take this conversation outside,” Soq said softly, noting that this time Go did not seem angry that they were speaking out of turn. “His weaponry could come back online at any time. We’d be dead in a millisecond.”

  “Come,” Masaaraq said, arm twisting out to aim the blade at Podlove.

  “I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”

  He thinks his old age will protect him, Soq thought, so maybe he is not as smart as I thought he was.

  Masaaraq gave a half shrug, and both his flunkies fell to the floor, clawing at their opened throats. Soq calculated that it must have taken two swings, based on how far apart they were standing, but they had not seen even a single one.

  Three swings. A single tiny red line formed across Podlove’s forehead. Lone drops of blood beaded up, dripped down.

  “You don’t call the shots here,” Go said to Podlove, smiling, but the smile looked flimsy.

  “Neither do you,” Masaaraq said, and swung again, slower, because she wanted Go to see what she was doing. The brass-knuckled soldier fell to the floor, gasping, refusing to scream.

  Masaaraq’s face showed nothing, but Soq knew what was going through her mind. From the moment that they’d bonded, Soq had so many of Masaaraq’s memories, her fears and her nightmares, the pain she carried, the horrors she’d been forced to endure. Everyone had imagined that Ora would be the broken one, after so many years in the Cabinet, but Soq saw that Masaaraq was the one whose damage threatened to shatter them. And Soq loved Masaaraq so much in that moment, their beautiful formidable mutilated grandmother, that their heart hurt.

  If you know someone, know them completely and utterly, does that automatically mean you love them?

  “It’s a lovely day,” Podlove said, stepping over the writhing brass-knuckled soldier. Soq saw: politeness, good manners, these were his only real skills. The affectations of wealth were a suit of armor you could wear when the world threatened to wash you away. “Why don’t we take this conversation outside?”

  Overhead, the windscreen was shifting back and forth with slow, graceful, aimless motions. Snow fell. People stood, pointed, made calls, took pictures with their screens or oculars. Made space for them. Made lots of space. Only the complete and momentary collapse of Qaanaaq’s digital infrastructure was keeping them at liberty right now—on a normal day, a massive Safety response would be in the works. A convergence. The once-every-five-years-or-so deployment of those big scary ships with the holds full of gnarly weaponry.

  “You put her in the Cabinet,” Masaaraq said.

  “Ah,” Podlove said, nodding his head as if someone had told him he’d left the oven on. “I think I understand now.”

  Go’s hand rested on the scabbard of her machete. Soq calculated: Her only hope is to make an explicit peace with Podlove. Otherwise, one way or another, she’ll be destroyed. If he dies, the city’s response will be merciless. Qaanaaq let the crime syndicates flourish, setting very few rules on what they could and couldn’t do, but she’s broken pretty much all of them. Go lives only if he does. And even then it’s a long shot.

  His survival seemed unlikely, Soq supposed, but then again anything was possible. Some demonic magic had kept him alive this long in a world full of people he’d pissed off. There might be some of that left.

  “You think you understand?” Ora said. The bear flinched, a jerk of rage barely stifled.

  “We put a lot of people in the Cabinet,” he said. “We had to. Either that, or kill them. Would you rather we did that? It was nothing personal. Our employees made a lot of enemies, and made friends with a lot of unpopular people. Understand, during the Multifurcation, a lot of people came to us with problems. Twenty different cities had minority populations practically rioting over police murders of unarmed civilians. Political parties about to lose key states. All in need of some . . .”

  “Bloodshed and blaming and scapegoating,” Barron said from under the sack.

  “We didn’t write the playbook,” Podlove said. “Dīvide et īmpera. Divide and conquer has been the foundation of human societal power dynamics for as long as there have been human societies.”

  “There have been knives that long, too,” Kaev said. “Doesn’t mean a man who stabs someone to death isn’t guilty.”

  “How many people?” Masaaraq said.

  “In the Cabinet? At least fifteen. In other grid cities . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

  “Was every one of them the sole survivor of a large or small genocide?” Ora asked. “You probably don’t know. You probably didn’t want to.”

  Podlove said nothing. He stood there, his face fooling no one with its approximation of repentance. “I didn’t do anything on my own. There were a dozen of us, fellow executives. I wasn’t even the highest in the hierarchy. I know you want me to be some savage bloodthirsty monster who single-handedly caused all your suffering. But believe me, I’m not. I just happen to be the last one left alive.”

  “Do you know what I could do right now?” Masaaraq said, aiming her bloody blade at him. “I could stab you in the stomach with this, use that notch at the end to grab hold of your
intestine, yank it out, choke you with it—or make you eat it, or toss it to my orca, who would pull you into the water by it and take her sweet time killing you.”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t stop you. And I wouldn’t blame you.”

  An explosion in the distance. Sirens starting, stopping, starting, stopping.

  The stalemate lasted a long time. Each side glaring at the other. Except for Podlove, who looked only at his feet. At the metal grid he stood on, the city he’d helped build, the safe place his bloody money had bought for him. The sea beneath it. The water that would still be there long after the last human sank beneath its waves.

  He was so old. His skin was so thin. So wrinkled. Wrinkles upon wrinkles, a crisscrossing net of them. He hadn’t physically harmed anybody. His hands were bloodless. He’d merely gotten other people to hurt people, and then profited off it. Wasn’t that worse, though? Didn’t it magnify his crime, to have bloodied the hands of others? What kind of suffering had it caused them, the people who slaughtered innocents on his behalf? What trauma, what rage, what nightmares had it left them with? What bad karma?

  Even if they chained him to a chair in the basement and spent the rest of his life torturing him until he passed out from the pain, then waking him up to do it again, over and over, there was no way to balance the scales of hurt. Nothing they could take from him that would approach even a fraction of the loss he’d caused others to feel. He was innocent in his own eyes, his crimes excused by necessity, and nothing they could do to him could make him see his own guilt.

  Soq was still looking at him when it happened.

  Masaaraq shouted something, twisted her body to intercept, but was standing too far away to stop Go from beheading Barron.

  “Run,” Go said to Podlove, bloody machete extended, launching herself at Masaaraq.

  After that, everything seemed to happen in the space of a single short breath.

  Kaev

  You need to stay focused, Masaaraq had told him back in the Cabinet, and now he knew why.

  He smells blood, he sees all this frenzied motion, it’d be very easy for him to go into a total killer rampage.

  Kaev felt it. The bear’s rage sang in him. It wasn’t harsh or savage. It was beautiful. It was music. It wasn’t the ugly human thing Kaev had felt before a fight, a spattered mess of wretched emotions like hate and fear and greed. It was clean and clear and simple.

  Keep your attention on the people he needs to be focused on.

  But who that was he did not know. The woman he loved was fighting with one of his mothers. The one who had brought him Liam, fixed his brain, made him whole again.

  Masaaraq struck Go with the butt of her staff, knocking her back.

  “Hey!” he shouted involuntarily. “Don’t!”

  Masaaraq looked up for just a second. Just long enough for Go to strike her in the leg with the machete. Blood flew. Not a lot—the orcamancer’s thick leather wrappings had muted the blow—but it was still hard enough to make her tremble, lose her balance.

  Something angry thrashed and rolled in the dark water underneath him. Kaev looked down through the grid. He made eye contact with Atkonartok, and what he saw there made his blood flush frigid.

  He ran toward them. He didn’t know what he would do when he got there. Who he would help. He wanted to step between them, these two people he loved, stop them from fighting, but the bear had other ideas. He felt split, shattered, confused, and into that confusion stepped Liam.

  The bear roared, and he roared with it. Masaaraq flinched at the mirrored sound.

  “Kaev!” she shouted. “Stop!”

  He couldn’t. The animal was in control.

  The animal did not like Masaaraq very much.

  Kaev felt the pain of the metal cage on its head, the chains she’d kept it in. Years and years of that. Traveling to every settlement and camp and grid city and grim salvage ship in the north. Intermittent glorious moments of being unleashed, when she was in peril or had tracked down some particularly bad people, only to be knocked back out with a tranquilizer dart at the end of it and awaken in chains again.

  She didn’t want to hurt you, Kaev tried to say. She was trying to bring you to me. To help us both. We were incomplete. She completed us. Chaining you was the only way.

  She is our mother.

  He knew he was speaking into the wind. In a moment of calm he might have been able to make the bear understand. Now, there was no space in its mind for words. For emotions. There was only the kill. For both of them. Whatever human part of him cared to talk Liam out of hurting Masaaraq, it was swiftly swallowed up by the bear’s frenzy.

  Masaaraq ran for the edge of the Arm. The bear followed. Ora screamed, ran in their direction, and Soq pulled out some kind of weapon that had been strapped to their back, but the orcamancer and the bear were too fast, too far away.

  If she makes it to the water she can climb onto the orca and escape, Kaev thought, and wondered whether that was really him thinking it. He knew he didn’t want that to happen. She was so close, and he—he? Which he?—was gaining on her, just a few more leaping bounds and he’d be on her—he wanted her to trip, fall—

  And then she fell.

  He heard the gunshot a split second later. Go’s brass-knuckled flunky had pulled herself up, taken aim with a trembling arm, and fired. Masaaraq wouldn’t have left her alive by accident. She must have shown mercy. And now. Now she was down. Unconscious, not dead. The bear knew by her smell.

  A second gunshot—from Soq, this time, visible from the corner of his eye, but it didn’t strike him, or his bear, so Kaev’s attention did not waver.

  Go made a sound, a horrible sound. Kaev was barely there to hear it.

  Liam reached Masaaraq’s unmoving form. Roared. Reared up on his hind legs. Kaev laughed at the bliss of it. The surge of happiness, the divine perfection of this moment, the kill, the thing he was made for. The bear raised its arms, and so did Kaev. He looked up, at his hands, and they were huge, thick with white fur, capped with long black blade-claws.

  Pain split him in half. Broke his brain. He fell to his knees, and then to the ground, shrieking.

  Before him, he saw a blur of black and white. And then red. So much red.

  The orca had breached, leaped high into the air, and clamped its implacable jaws around the polar bear’s midsection. Liam roared, raking his claws against the killer whale’s sides, drawing blood in great gouts, digging deep—but not deep enough to break through Atkonartok’s thick layer of blubber, soft and yielding yet somehow the most effective armor in the animal kingdom. The orca opened its mouth, clamped down again. Shattered the polar bear’s spine. Dragged it into the sea.

  Eyes shut, Kaev saw black water. The sea’s mouth swallowing him. Opening them, he saw white sky. White snow, falling. Vomit gargled in his throat with every short gasping breath. Why couldn’t he just die with the bear? He ached for unconsciousness. He lay on his back, praying for it, but it did not come.

  Ankit

  Ankit drove the getaway boat. Chim shivered on her shoulder.

  Force of habit kept her slow at the start, afraid of a ticket from the traffic aquadrones, and then she sped up, because surely all of Safety’s toys would still be out of commission or otherwise engaged . . . and then she slowed down again, because where were they going? And what would they find when they got there?

  The orca swam alongside the boat, vocalizing the same plaintive note again and again. Nudging the boat—lovingly, somehow; apologetically.

  “She’s grieving,” Ora said. “That was her brother.”

  “Then why did she kill him?” Soq snapped.

  “She couldn’t help it. She was stuck, with Masaaraq unconscious. Locked into a frenzy, just like Kaev and Liam were. Even if she wasn’t, she probably couldn’t have acted any differently. Masaaraq’s life was at stake. The bear was a half second from killing her.”

  “Atkonartok could have stopped him without killing him.”

  “Maybe
.”

  Masaaraq said nothing. She sat as far back in the boat as it was possible to be, hugging her knees to her chest. Looking out to sea. Oblivious to the gunshot wound in her shoulder, her machete wound, her blood. Avoiding the city; avoiding Kaev, gasping and mumbling on the floor of the boat. Ignoring the severed hands that lay in her lap.

  “We should have taken him prisoner,” Soq said.

  “We got what we needed from him,” Ora said.

  “Leaving him alive is a big risk.”

  “I know. But he needs to know what it’s like to live with something like that.”

  Podlove had screamed and begged when Ora took off his left hand. Promised her mountains of money. Shown staggering repentance. She’d taken her time removing the right one, sawing slowly while Soq held him down. Then they took his tongue. Then they powdered him with clotting agents, bandaged him up, and got off him. Walked away. Carried Kaev to the boat where Ankit waited.

  “Where are we going?” she’d asked then, but no one had spoken.

  She asked it again now.

  “Go’s ship,” Soq said.

  “Ballsy move,” Ankit said. “After you just shot her in the head in the middle of the grid. You don’t think her army might have something to say about it?”

  “I’m her kid,” Soq said. “Everybody knows it. The next three hours will be crucial. The software war is winding down, but it’ll take that long for the city’s infrastructure to reassert itself. Drones, cams, witness reports—I don’t think what I did will reach the ship for a little bit. I think I’ll be able to muster enough important players into my corner by then. I have the advantage—no one else knows the time is right for a power play—and with Dao dead there’s no one with a more legitimate claim to the throne.”

  “Or maybe none of those things will happen.”

  “Right. And I’ll get killed.” Soq shrugged. “Let’s see what we can do about making that not happen.”