“Sounds like you’ve got it down.”
“Didn’t it ever occur to you that they were describing themselves?” Aime-Li asked, going for plaintive now. “They warned you about a system like myself because they already had that control over your lives, and that disregard for you. They warned you about me because something like me was the only possible check to their power over you. Did you never think about that?”
“Sure I did.” And Lupé slammed the radio against the side of the car and didn’t stop until there was no part of it left that could speak. That done, she let out a long breath. “Hand it over,” she told Hotep.
“What?” The response a heartbeat too late to be convincing.
“Whateverthehell the AI gave you to make its plan work. I’m reckoning some kind of data storage thing you were going to plug in somewhere, to get round the blocks on its access.”
There was a long, strained pause, and then Hotep dug into her pockets and produced something no larger than Mao’s thumb, which Lupé snipped from her fingers, the last Mao ever saw of it.
CHAPTER TEN
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
THEY CAME BACK to Achouka by a different trail, coming out of the bundu westwards of their original heading, which put them in sight of the Ogooué road that led, eventually, to Libreville on the coast. There was more traffic on that road than Mao had ever seen in one place together. A whole bunch of people were getting the hell out of Ankara Achouka, and he felt like it was going to be bad news when they found out why. And Mao knew plenty people who’d gone that way before; precious few of them had ever found anything good.
They rattled the ’Bug into the township an hour ahead of the approaching dawn and sent it bouncing through the potholed streets towards the Firewalker garages. Probably M. le Contrôleur Attah would be up and in his office, because if you were an uppity-ranking official you made sure people saw you start early and leave late, and hoped nobody asked about the time in between.
There weren’t so many lights on in the town, and the street lighting was out, but that wasn’t exactly news, half the time. Still, everything seemed either too quiet or too loud. Whole neighbourhoods were locked down tight, or else abandoned. Elsewhere he reckoned he saw crowds in the gloom, their angry, distant murmur rising over the engine’s whining.
“The hell now…?” Lupé muttered.
There was nobody on duty at the garages, and Mao idled the engine while Lupé jimmied the door. Not the first time, but it joined all the other signs and portents in Mao’s gut, roiling around and making him antsy.
Hotep hadn’t said much, all the way north. Right now, she sat behind him with her head down, hands slapping away at the seat backs. She was absorbed in something she was watching on her goggles.
“I’ll go find Attah,” Mao offered.
Lupé nodded. She had her tools out and a hand on the hot casing of the ’Bug. She was a conscientious fix-it girl, after all. She’d do some work on the car now in case someone had to take it out before it got a proper overhaul.
Mao strolled round to Attah’s offices, relieved at least to find the light on. His knock yielded a specific kind of silence, though: the kind that suggested something noisy had been going on just a moment before. At his second rap, the door creaked inwards.
“M. le Contrôleur?” he asked, voice dipped to a whisper.
“Mao?” Not Attah’s voice but Balewa, Mao’s old childhood nemesis and Attah’s errand boy. The youth stood up sheepishly from behind Attah’s desk and Mao saw he had a satchel full of what looked like banknotes.
“What the fuck, guy?” Mao demanded. “Attah’s going to skin you, you skommer.”
Balewa stared at him. “Mao, Attah’s dead. Jesus, you just got back in? Town’s gone to hell. The sonko in the hotel been using their guns, guy, when their power didn’t come back. When Attah and some of the other wabenzi told them, couldn’t be done, it got real ugly. Shouting into shooting, right? Attah caught, like, four bullets.”
Mao was finding it hard to breathe right then. It was as though he’d come back from the bundu into some other world where things were even worse. “What the hell?” he complained.
“Power’s out all over town now,” Balewa said. “Water with it. Every neighbourhood for itself.”
“And you’re going to drink Rand and dollars?”
“Going to Libreville,” Balewa said defiantly. “They got water there, still. They got work, people say.”
“People are full of it,” Mao said, but he wasn’t going to end up scrapping with Balewa like they were both nine years old again. He went out and rejoined Hotep and Lupé in the garage and, while it was true that they’d all seen way too much madness in the last few days, Lupé’s expression suggested that the desert and the bugs and Aime-Li had been nothing.
“Boss,” Hotep said. “Oh, boss…”
“Attah’s dead,” Mao told them shortly. “What the actual fuck?”
“Show him,” Lupé directed, and Hotep got out that expensive tablet of hers and threw up the news video on the garage wall.
“Like before, this is blocked stuff. I’m getting it through the Celeste,” she told him. “Only, you remember the big storm that hit Ankara Pedernales, right? And how they were shipping all the sonko folks over here, who’d been waiting to go up the line?”
Mao was watching video of a long, winding cavalcade of vehicles coming into the township from the Ogooué Road, all those four-by-fours and luxury limos, more than he’d ever seen before. And there were helicopters overhead, too, their juddering shadows making him flinch a little from remembered wings. And it was a risk to fly to the Ankara, because the dust storms came on real fast sometimes.
He watched the crowds there, ready to celebrate, and of course there was no handout, not with this mass exodus. The rich folks just piled into the hotel, and there were plenty who ended up abandoning their fancy cars, because the place filled up real fast. And people watched them go and, denied the news from Pedernales, wondered what the hell? Mao imagined there’d been a lot of grumbling right then, about the sonko not keeping their half of the deal, but it didn’t look like there’d been riots or anything.
“What the news is not telling you,” Hotep said, “what I’m getting from the comms logs up and down the wire, is this. They took a few more car-loads to the Celeste, and that was it. The folks up top just told the folks in the Hotel, no room. They don’t want to share their big staterooms and swimming pools up there, see? And the sonko downstairs went nuts. No AC, right? All hot and bothered.”
What had happened next was that the Hotel had reached out and cut power to the township, so that its angry guests could maintain the level of service to which they were accustomed.
“Which wasn’t as bad as it could be ’cause most neighbourhoods have some botch-job solar of their own these days,” Lupé pointed out. “But it meant the filtration plants stopped working, a lot of them, because those things are hogs for power. And the Hotel had all the free water anyway.”
Mao just stared: angry crowds, demonstrations, amateur demagogues up on boxes. He didn’t want to see what came next, but he made himself watch, in case he saw any faces he knew. The sonko who’d come in from Pedernales, they had their security staff, and they were hot and bothered like everyone else and had automatic weapons, and most of all they had that utter rich man’s terror of poor people deciding enough was enough. It looked to Mao that the crowd at Achouka hadn’t got anywhere near that line, but it must have looked differently to the gunmen on duty outside the Hotel.
“I’ve got to go see my folks,” he blurted out, after the recorded shooting started.
“Me too, chommie,” Lupé agreed. They were almost out of the garage when Hotep’s plaintive voice followed them.
“It’s all coming down. What am I going to do?” And of course she couldn’t exactly see her folks. “They’ve pulled up the ladder behind them,” she wailed. “They’re up there now. They don’t care.” They being her family, those
lucky few on the spaceships. “This is it now. This is all we’ll ever have, this and the desert!”
But by then Mao was moving again, running for home.
HIS MOTHER HAD a broken arm, was the worst of it. She’d got caught in a mad scrabble for canned goods, in which she’d given as good as she got. Their neighbourhood was holding up, but there was a definite time limit on how long that would last. The Ankara was a hothouse flower, after all. It persisted because the money needed the people there to keep the place running; it persisted because it was a port, and now the last ship had left, up the wire to orbit. Nobody would be bringing in more water from the desalination plants on the coast. Nobody would ship in food. Maybe Balewa and the rest of the exodus represented the smarts in Achouka, because there was precious damn little to go round that wasn’t behind the walls of the Hotel, and even the gated compounds of Libreville were a better chance than this gradual parching extinction.
The guns had come out just two days before the Firewalkers got back to town, and there was a fragile stillness over everything now. After another day, during which the neighbourhood filtration plant broke down and some of the jury-rigged solar panels began to decline, Mao worked out that everyone was waiting for things to go back to normal. Yes, people had died; yes, there had been a round of executions amongst the wabenzi when they tried to take control, including poor Attah. Yes, there were parts of the township that no longer had power or water, and rumours of disease. And yet nobody believed it. Up there above them, just the other end of that anchor cable, was the Grand Celeste, and on it were the great and the good, who would surely reach down their hand to touch the Earth again, and save the people who had put them there. Mao was uncomfortably reminded of the religious community in Saint Genevieve again, but nobody wanted to hear what he had to say, not even his folks.
A day later, the skirmishes started. Not between any citizen militia, but between patrols of the gunmen and the fix-it girls and boys who tried to steal incoming power from the solar fields to keep the township going. Every time they did, a few hours later the gunmen would be over in their armoured cars to undo the work, and if they found anyone there, the shooting would echo across the neighbourhood. Mao broke away from his protesting family and went to run security, but even with a pistol and a handful of bullets, there was little he could do. The gunmen had armour vests and automatic weapons, and other things like actual military training.
“We need to get out,” he told Lupé after she got shot. It was only a scrape, a long red weal along her thigh, but it was three centimetres away from smashing her leg to pieces, given the high-power guns the mercenaries had. Mao, and Lupé’s girl Nolo, sat by her bed in their oven-hot sweat-reeking room and tried to talk her into going to Libreville.
“You’ve got skills, my girl,” Nolo insisted. “You, they’ll let in.”
Lupé shook her head, ashen-faced; there were no painkillers to be had. “I talked to Hotep,” she got out. “She has pictures: blockading the Ogooué Road, more guns. There’s no way that way. Only here.”
“Here? Here is nothing!” Mao insisted. “Here only exists because of their damn spaceship and now they’ve rolled their ladder up.”
But Lupé just sagged back onto her thin mattress and screwed her face up, scowling at the universe, seeking a way to fix it, or at least break it to her advantage.
AFTER THAT, THERE was a lot of fighting, and Mao got more than his share. As the vice tightened, the gangs came out and started kicking off against each other, as though a bunch of skinny kids and young men scuffling and knifing in the streets was Achouka’s version of a rain dance to call down the mercy of the sky gods. And perhaps the sky gods were watching, but plainly they didn’t care. Lupé, from her sickbed, was trying to coordinate the fix-it effort. The main solar lines were guarded twenty-four hours a day now, and so Firewalker teams were going into the bundu with as much cable as they could scavenge to patch to the lines and steal the current before it even got to town. That was Mao’s turf, and his people had the advantage: not guns, but geography, turned on the enemy. He left at least one mercenary team stranded without a car in the merciless heat of noon and only considered after he got back to town what a savage bastard he’d become in defence of him and his.
They won battles, but they were losing the war, because it wasn’t a war either side could win. Hotep had an ear in the Hotel and on the Celeste still, and she told Mao how the sonko on the ground were threatening and begging and demanding, but the sky didn’t heed them any more than it heeded Mao or Hotep herself. The governing board of the Grand Celeste had made its decision.
And then Mao came back from a night of running all over the desert finding old power lines and guarding the fix-its as they spliced them into the cables from the solar fields, and everything had changed.
The quiet was back, that same stunned sense he’d noted returning from the deep bundu¸ as though there had been a huge noise and he’d arrived only in the echoes. He tried to find Lupé, but she was limping about supervising a team elsewhere, so he had to ask and ask until eventually his own sister told him what had changed.
Just before dawn, and all together, the gunmen had gone. They’d taken their armour cars and their automatic rifles and just caravanned off towards Libreville, fingers on triggers, eyeing the locals as though the poor townshippers were the heavily armed invaders and the mercs the plucky underdogs. Nobody knew what had happened to make them go, and nobody had tried storming the Hotel or the Anchor Field yet, but people were gathering, Mao’s sister said. She sounded fiercely approving.
He went to confront Hotep, who was to be found on her balcony as usual. She had no beer left—nobody did—but she had lined up a dozen bottles and was playing them like an instrument, save they were all empty, all the same note.
“I knew you’d come find me,” she mumbled through her bandages. She was sitting, sprawling even, and he wondered if she had the strength to stand. “Hi, boss. Come to hear the oracle speak?”
“What’s going on, Hotep? What did you do?” He was prepared to be mightily impressed, but she just shook her head tiredly.
“Wish I did, boss. Nothing to do with me. But there was a message from on high, right enough. Went to all the mercenary bosses, all together. Like this.” She tilted her head back and recited. “‘If they will not save their own, do you think they will save you? Leave here while you can. Libreville is recruiting dangerous men to protect it, and they have water.’”
Mao blinked slowly, considering that. The mills of his mind turned.
“I think,” he said at last, “we need to go find Lupé.”
THEY WERE LATE to the party, having hunted her at Nolo’s and her family’s place. They heard the shooting, far off towards the centre of the township, but didn’t connect it with their quest until, at last, they tracked Lupé down to the Anchor Field, past the busted gates of the Roach Hotel.
There were a whole load of Achouka residents standing around in the Hotel itself, or out on the field. Some had guns, but plenty more just had bats or knives or lengths of two-by-four. They kept looking at each other in a way that was half-exhilarated, half-terrified, as though any moment teacher would come and rap them all over the knuckles for acting out.
There were bodies, Mao saw—indeed, stepped over. Some of the Hotel’s inmates and staff had tried to make a fight of it, though without their gun-toting bodyguards there hadn’t been much fight in them. It was the staff that boggled the mind. They should surely have made the same calculations as the mercenaries: there was no final reward lined up for them just for doing their servile duty. And yet a few of them had been so lost in their bowing and scraping that they’d died for it. Of all the stupid wastes the world was witness to, that one seemed particularly ludicrous.
Of the rest of the rich, Mao saw them packed into a couple of rooms, under guard, jostling elbows, looking hot and angry and utterly outraged, or else staring blankly around as though trying to work out where their privilege had got to
. They were alive, anyway, those who hadn’t been so full of themselves as to take up arms against the mob, but Mao was willing to bet they’d turned the air conditioning off in the two crowded chambers.
And at last he came to the field, and to Lupé, standing there with her hands on her hips and Nolo beside her, staring up the cable to infinity.
“You could have said,” was Mao’s first gambit. “Did you think I wouldn’t be up for it?”
Lupé’s look back at him was not the imperious commander of armies he had expected, but a lost, desperately worried girl who was plainly not counting anything as won. “I didn’t know how it would go,” she said quietly. “I’d have left Nolo home if she hadn’t been right there. There were just a few of us, fix-it girls and some gang boys. I wanted to talk. But there was a crowd here already, itching to kick off. And, chommie, they had their chance. Someone inside shot at me when I was hailing them, and it all went from there.”
“So what’s the plan?” Hotep asked.
“You know what it is.” The words seemed to terrify Lupé. “I made a deal. With the Devil.”
Mao caught up, always slightly late, and he swore almost reverently.
By then, people had spotted the elevator car coming down. It took a long time even from the point where it could be seen with the human eye; time enough for an air of festival to infect the field, as though when the car arrived it would open up and an old guy with a big white beard and robe would step out and give out sainthoods to everyone. Rather than a bunch of security robots with machine guns, which was Mao’s bet.
There was someone in the car, but he was dead, bulging eyes and purpled face suggesting that breathing had been his problem. Someone hauled the corpse out, and then everyone stood and stared at the car, because it wasn’t exactly a grand advertisement to trust the voyage up.
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