Mitigated Futures

by Buckell, Tobias S.

  It didn’t matter what or who caused it. The end effect was that the town used pneumatic tubes to send messages. Ox-men from Okur pulled rickshaws around, or people used the compressed air powered trolley cars. Everything ran on compressed air: the town’s reservoirs were filled by the myraid wind turbines that festooned the harbor entrance and the exposed ridges of the mountain.

  But because of the deadzone, this woman shouldn’t have been here, Tiago thought. She shouldn’t even work. But in the cramped darkness of his room the cyborg woman squatted on Tiago’s handcarved wooden stool.

  As Tiago turned on a bright white LED lamp she counted off a lot more money than he’d stolen, or given back to her. Bill after bill after bill. A massive fistful. A month’s takings.

  It hovered between them.

  “Before you tagged me and made the pick,” she said, “you seemed to know your way around the harbor. I need someone like you.”

  Tiago took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he needed someone like her.

  She was trouble.

  The hesitation must have been obvious to her. She smiled. “I’ll double what you want.”

  What was the alternative? Tiago took the money. He’d be a fool not to.

  “What are you looking to do?” he asked.

  “I need to find the person at the top of the underground. Who sees all and knows all.” The cyborg shifted, and the stool creaked. Tiago grimaced. It was made of imported wood, and it was his most precious posession. “I’m looking for Kay.”

  “Kay?” Tiago feigned confusion.

  “You know who I’m talking about,” the woman smiled.

  He did. He wasn't very good at lying straight-faced. He swallowed nervously. “What do you need from her?"

  “I need Kay’s help.” Tiago waited for more, and the cyborg continued. “To find my grandfather. How do I find this person?”

  “You don’t find Kay,” Tiago said. He folded the money away into the depths of his ragged clothes. “She finds you. Go find yourself a nice room along the waterfront somewhere. Kay will show up now that someone knows you’re trying to find her. That’s how it works.”

  “Word on the street.” The woman leaned forward and held out her hand. A card rested in her palm. “I’ll pay you the other half when I meet Kay. Come find me tomorrow at noon.”

  Tiago took the card. An address had been scribbled onto it. “What is your name, then?”

  “Nashara.”

  Nashara. A cyborg called Nashara. The Nashara? Was he really talking to a living, breathing legend?

  Tiago’s hands shook.

  She was a lot more than just trouble.

  He’d gotten himself in way, way deep into something.

  ***

  Nashara, left, walking out in to the sizzling rain like it was no more than an inconvenience.

  It was only a moment before Tiago’s neighbours parted and the tiny figure of Kay walked out. Her grey eyes took in the broken brick with a flick before she turned to face him. Her hair was cut just short of her ears, almost boyish. She was shorter than Tiago, something that always surprised him. In his own mind she stood much taller. “I’ll have it repaired,” she said calmly, flicking her head at the destruction.

  Kay’s fixing the damage would obligate them to her.

  But no one said anything. Refusing it would be an even bigger problem.

  They might come to beat him up tonight, Tiago thought. If they weren't too scared.

  “You were here the whole time?” Tiago asked, his voice cracking slightly with fear.

  Kay ignored his surprise. “That was a Nashara. Here on the island. I wonder how she’s able to work here?” Ox-men: two large slabs of hairy muscle, large eyes and flat noses, squeezed into the passageway behind her, stooping over to fit. They regarded Tiago with dull, incurious eyes.

  “I don’t know…” Tiago muttered.

  Kay unpacked a kevlar poncho and pulled it carefully on. She buckled on a gas mask. Behind her, the two Ox-men did the same.

  In a muffled voice she told Tiago, “Do you know how expensive it would be to shield someone like her, a cyborg, to be able to function in the deadzone? That must be what she’s done. It means she has access to… incredible resources." She paused thoughtfully, thinking about that. Then she continued. "I have preparations to make before I’ll meet her. Keep your appointment. I’ll send someone for you both.”

  She stepped out into the rain, and the Ox-men followed her. The three of them disappeared over the side of the building in the haze, and Tiago turned around to face the boys trying to hide in the shadows.

  He could tell by the fear on their faces that they would not be bothering him.

  They were far, far too scared of Kay.

  So was he.

  ***

  Nashara sat at a table outside a seawall restaurant, surveying the Plaza over a cup of tea. A few small fires had broken out the night before where jellied rain had landed on canopies or abandoned stalls. But considering the strength of last night’s storm, it wasn’t too bad, Tiago thought. He’d certainly seen worse.

  His new benefactor motioned Tiago to sit with her.

  “It’s odd,” she muttered as he sat. “All this stone, brick, slate. Leather for clothes. No wood, no fabrics. Hardly any trees, not even scrub. Grim.”

  Tiago looked down at his patched clothes. She was surprisingly ignorant about the island if she was the real Nashara. The real Nashara had cloned her own mind to infect alien starships in the fight for human independence. The real Nashara was a founder of the Xenowealth. The real Nashara was a force of nature. That Nashara, it seemed to Tiago, would, at least know about stuff here on the island. “Rich people have them,” he said. “In those glass houses.”

  “Greenhouses?”

  Tiago shrugged. “Sure.”

  Sometimes, in the quieter moments, looking out over the harbor, he’d wondered what the places were like out over the horizon, and through the wormhole the ships sailed through to get to the oceans of other worlds, and through wormholes in those oceans to even more. Other worlds where things were made, and then transported here. Where people like Nashara came from.

  But it was useless to daydream too much about where the ships went. Because they weren’t taking Tiago along with them. No matter how much he wished for it whenever he sat on the sea wall.

  Nashara set her tiny wooden cup down and stood up. “I think Kay will be receiving us now.”

  Tiago turned around, and the two Ox-men he’d seen last night had silently, amazingly for their bulk, walked up right behind him.

  They didn’t have to say anything, they turned around and began to walk away. Nashara followed.

  And that, he thought, was the end of that.

  ***

  Only it wasn’t.

  Up at the end of Onyx street, down the stairs cut into the side of the road and in the basement of an old house tunelled into a rock outcropping at the very edge of town, was one of Kay’s many lairs.

  He’d been summoned there, two days later.

  Amber late-afternoon light pierced the dusty windows, and a menagerie of Placa del Fuego’s shadowy denizens milled about. There were more Ox-men, some Runners, and even a few simple-minded Servants. Lots of grubby kids like Tiago, many of them faces he recognized from Elizan’s crew crowded in, as well as others from all over the rest of the city. They were Kay’s crew, now, all of them. She owned the Waterfront and the Back Ring, and was almost done finishing up controlling the Harbor.

  If it was criminal, and happened in Placa del Fuego, Kay wanted to run it.

  It had been different, last year. Last year Tiago worked for Elizan; a high strung old man who would leap at a chance to whip anyone who’d held back the take.

  A tough life: Tiago still had misshapen broken bones to prove it, but it beat trying to live outside alone. Something he’d learned quickly enough.

  Placa del Fuego had no heart for the homeless.

  When Kay appeared on the stre
ets in the Back Ring, rain-burned and tired, she’d been ignored. For the first week. The second week she’d figured out the command structure of one of the drug cartels and executed the commander with a sliver of knapped flint.

  Within days the cartel danced to her tune.

  Rumors said she came from Okur, where the birdlike alien Nesaru had established a colony. Under the Bacigalupi Doctrine, anticipating the lack of fuel and the collapse of the interstellar travel after the war for independence, the Nesaru had bred humans into a variety of forms to serve them. Nesaru engineered, bred, and reshaped human Ox-men and Runners had fled Okur to Placa del Fuego. So had Kay.

  She was something else, Okur refugees said. Something designed to control the modified human slaves under the Nesaru’s thumb. She could read your thoughts by the slightest change in your posture, a twitch in a facial muscle. She emitted pheremones to calm you, convince you, and used her body to control your personal space.

  You were a computer, waiting to be programmed. She was your taskmaster. A perfect, bred, engineered, manipulator of humankind.

  “Tiago,” Kay said, beckoning him closer. “Nashara and I have quite a job for you.”

  Nashara stepped out from behind a thick stone pillar. “There will be considerably more money in it for you.”

  Kay put a protective arm around Tiago. “I really need your help with this, Tiago.”

  He stiffened slightly as she moved in closer, creating a tiny world between just the three of them. “What do you need?” he asked, hesitant.

  “You keep a low profile, Tiago. Back of the crowd. You don’t try to cheat me of my cut. You wouldn’t even dare think of it.”

  Tiago nodded. Don’t get noticed. Don’t cross dangerous people like Kay unless you could run. Melt into the background. These were core life principles of his. It was why he made a good pickpocket. There was even a mid-sized bounty available for his capture.

  “More importantly, you’ve been in the Dekkan Holding Center,” Nashara said. In the distant background the sound of rain alarms drifted through the streets. A night storm. The worst kind.

  A cold chill gripped Tiago. “You want me to go back to The Center?” Images of the dark warrens flitted back to the front of his mind.

  “Not as such.” Kay pointed a kevlar poncho and gas mask hanging by the door. “Suit up.”

  ***

  They walked through the slowly darkening streets, the rain hissing against their protective gear. Nashara wore goggles and a long leather fisherman’s coat that seemed impervious to the rain, Kay the same outfit as Tiago.

  Their footsteps clicked against cobblestone as Kay led them through sidealleys and tiny backstreets so cramped they had to move through them single file.

  No one else was out.

  Tiago stopped a tremble in his hands at the thought of being out at night.

  Several times they came to dead ends, where small locked doors stopped Kay’s progress. But a few knocks in a pattern and they would open, and the trio would tromp through someone’s front room, leaving sizzling drops of rain behind.

  There was no hurry, and Tiago guaged that they’d moved across the entire city over the last two hours.

  Kay finally stopped and removed her gas mask in the quiet foyer of a restaurant, erie in its empty state, though the tables were all set and ready: waiting for the morning crowd. She looked right at Tiago as he removed his mask. He burned his fingers on the wet straps as she said, “I’m turning you over to the warden of the DHC for the bounty. The driver of the prison wagon has been paid to suggest stopping to pick you up.”

  He felt numb. Outside, Tiago saw through the windows, the rain had fallen to a drizzle. The gaslight streetlamps flickered shadows as the wind flicked their flames this way and that.

  “So you do want me back in the hellhole,” he said, the misery leaking out into his voice.

  Kay pulled out a packet of photos and spread them with a flourish across a nearby table like a card dealer. “No. You’ll get picked up, but there’s someone inside the wagon that Nashara wants.”

  Tiago frowned. Kay was helping Nashara why? He couldn’t quite put together what was happening here.

  Kay leaned close. She was doing it, creating that little bubble of space that seemed to exist just between the two of them. It was some sort of talent, almost magical. “Don’t try to figure it out, Tiago. Just take a look at the pictures of the crew of the Zephyr III. One of them will be in the wagon. We need your help.”

  He looked up and out of the bay windows. He wondered how far he could get if just ran. He had some money, maybe he could stowaway on a boat.

  How long could he evade Kay?

  Not very long.

  She gently grabbed his jaw to point his gaze back down at the table. She’d read his thoughts via his body language. “There’s no running, Tiago. Not now.”

  He swallowed and committed the faces before him to memory, something other than fear building as she put a hand on his back to steady him.

  “I’ll be there as well,” Nashara said from by the door. She’d opened her coat up, and underneath Tiago saw more guns lining the inside than he’d even known a single person could carry. She was a walking arsenal. You rarely saw any guns on the island, too expensive, even for criminals.

  “So why don’t you just break into the wagon and get the person you want?” Tiago asked.

  “Don’t want to tip my hand until we know we have the person we want. Otherwise, if we go in too early guns blazing on the wrong wagon, our guy could get hidden further, or put under tougher security. So you’re our scout, Tiago. When you give us the go ahead, we move in to recover both of you.”

  “And if the person isn’t there, I get beaten, interrogated, and locked up.”

  “We will get you out quickly if that happens, we can bribe a few judges, and Nashara is ready to pay you well,” Kay said. She was pulling on her poncho. Before she snapped on the bug-like gasmask, she continued. “I have to go meet the wagon. I’ll be back shortly.”

  This was his moment to bolt.

  Nashara picked up the pictures of the crew. “Three weeks ago. You remember anything strange happening?”

  Tiago stopped thinking about other lives and worlds. “There was a fight. At night. All over the town. Whoever it was burst through walls, fell through roofs. Ripped up road. No one saw much of it. We just saw the damage…”

  “It was my grandfather: Pepper was on his way back with information about a new threat to the Xenowealth worlds. He disappeared here, last seen getting aboard the Zephyr III. But the Zephyr was destroyed in a limited yield nuclear blast event nowhere near any of the wormholes out, but a hundred miles north of here in the polar ocean.

  “Word is that one survivor from the Zephyr III came back. You’re going to help me acquire him. I came with a ship, it’s pretty heavily armed up: the Streuner. Pepper didn’t have backup, I’m not making the same mistake. Once we’re on the ship, it’s a run for the wormhole, back into the heart of the Xenowealth, for debriefing.”

  Acquire him. There was a strange turn of a word, Tiago thought. She was a kindred soul to Kay. Someone who wove the fate of everyone around them.

  He was just a pickpocket. It was all he ever really aspired to. His own quiet moments on the seawall, a safe, dry place to sleep. Good food.

  Now he was caught up in something that involved the fates of the connected worlds.

  “What does Kay get out of it?” Tiago asked, treading into areas which he knew he shouldn’t be poking his nose.

  Nashara tapped the inside of her coat, and the guns jiggled. “Force multipliers.”

  “You know what she’ll do with all that?”

  Nashara nodded, her dreadlocks shaking as she did so. “She plans to run the island.”

  “She will.”

  “Maybe. But only if she stops depending brazenly on those modifcations the Nesaru bred into her.” She smiled at Tiago’s shock that she knew about that rumor. “You’re an open book to her.
And she holds your strings. But only when she’s standing in front of you. She has to learn other ways to get people to do her bidding, and her teachers have been the underbelly of Harbortown. To be a great leader requires more, it requires people to trust you just as much when you’re not standing right in front of them. That takes something else. Besides, what she has: it’s not that special a talent.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “Yes. Different technology, not biological, but same result. But Tiago, free will’s a bitch. Kay can only manipulate. Underneath, we still move our own lives forward. You understand? We fought the entire war over that, back when the Satrapy ruled everything. Before human independence.”

  Only someone as powerful as she was, Tiago thought, could believe that about free will.

  He chose not to say that.

  But then, she could probably see him thinking that anyway.

  “Here.” Nashara pressed a small sliver of metal into his palm. “Jam that under the target’s skin, it’ll tag him for me and let us know to come get you both.”

  “Okay.” He’d have to keep this out of the cops’ hands. Easy enough. He’d snuck small items around the heavy security of The Center.

  Outside the loud hiss of a compressed air powered wagon drew closer, and then it stopped. Nashara pulled a large pistol out and aimed it cheerfully at Tiago’s head. “Time to turn you in, Tiago.”

  ***

  Tiago had sworn many oaths to never end back up in one of these wagons. Yet here he was again. It was near midnight as they jerked into motion with a belch. Tiago looked around. Unfamiliar, bruised, battered faces regarded him.

  For a moment he panicked, not seeing any of the faces from the pictures Kay had shown him. He imagined getting locked away in the sweaty man-made caverns underneath Harbor Town.

  Then he saw the youngest face in the wagon and recognized it from the photos he’d been shown of the crew of the Zephyr III. It was just a boy. A boy who was younger than Tiago.