by Wesley Chu
Surrett was about to say something when Shura held a hand up. “We are in Mogg’s territory. We wait.” The entire room stood around a few more minutes until Mogg finished writing something in a ledger, then slammed the book shut with a slap. The rumbling in the room died immediately.
Mogg leaned forward into the light. “So you’re the one who prettied up Faiz and poked holes in his boys. I always told him he should have hired union.”
To Shura’s mild surprise, Mogg, the reputed crime boss, union leader, and most feared gangster in Crate Town, was a woman.
“Shrimati Mogg,” said Surrett, bowing lower than he did for Shura when they met. “I wish–”
“Keep your mouth closed, Minister,” Mogg snapped. “I’m talking to the pretty lady.”
Shura stepped up to the end of the table and studied the strange Indian woman. She appeared middle-aged, stoutly built, and had her hair chopped short. It was faint, but the left half of her face was scarred; acid perhaps? An old gash on the right side, climbing all the way from her chin to her scalp, was definitely caused by a blade. Mogg had seen some rough business in her day.
The woman was, in turn, studying her as well, her eyes lingering on Shura’s face and her body-fitting suit. Mogg’s head dipped under the table, and then reappeared a few seconds later. She grinned. “Flats. Practical. Almost the ensemble, but you drew the line somewhere.”
“Some compromises are too costly.”
“You have the bearing of a soldier, girl.”
“And you the absolute ruler of a very small kingdom.”
“Yet one you wish to own.”
“A small kingdom here can be worth a larger kingdom elsewhere.”
Mogg chuckled. “The empty suit over there already tried that on me. He wants to move me an hour inland. I run a dock union.” She threw a thumb at the men surrounding them. “How are we supposed to do our jobs landlocked at the other end of Crate Town?”
Shura shrugged. “Be a union doing something else.”
“You hear that, boys,” Mogg barked. “Should we rename ourselves the plumbing union? Or how about trucking?”
“Actually,” said Surrett. “The BMS labor union–”
Shura turned to Surrett. “You heard Mogg. Be quiet.”
The banging of staves and shovels and sticks on the floor began again, shaking the entire building as their echoes bounced around the metal walls. Mogg threw a hand up and they quieted instantly once more. Her jovial expression took a serious turn. “I think we like being the dock union. Now, get out before someone gets hurt.”
Did you notice that? Near precision. These are not normal dockworkers. Half are probably ex-military.
Shura scanned the rough-looking men and saw the small signs everywhere: battle scars, bullet wounds, aggressive stances. A good number of them had seen war before. She was in a more precarious position than she had anticipated.
Mogg must have noticed Shura eying her men. “Are you really as tough as Faiz painted you to be, or is he just trying to save a little face?”
At that moment, Shura decided she needed to gamble and give this room something to think about. She grabbed the wrist of the nearest goon, pulled him off balance, and then bent his arm at an unnatural angle. He screamed, and then she let go before she broke his arm. Another of the workers pawed at her. She slapped his hand away and, with a kick to the midsection, sent him bowling over several more of his friends.
To your left!
The end of a shovel swung lazily near her head. Shura caught it with one hand, and then pushed, jabbing the handle into the gut of her assailant. The mob closed in on her small group, knocking the policemen over as a riot sparked in this small enclosed space. Just as it teetered out of control, Shura shut it down. She drew her pistol and swung it in a wide circular arc. Mogg’s men cried out in alarm and stampeded backward, some running over their friends as they retreated.
The muzzle of her gun came to a rest pointing at Mogg, and then Shura placed the pistol on the table. “I could fight you, Shrimati Mogg, but I’d rather work with you.”
“I can’t be threatened or bought off,” Mogg snapped. If Shura’s little display of force fazed her, she didn’t show it.
“I don’t want to do either. I want to work with you. Name a price.”
Mogg studied her, and then broke into a grin. “I like your spunk, girl. I’ll play.” She glanced around the room and made a show of adding up all the assets. Shura would bet her life that the woman knew exactly how much she wanted. “To buy all union property and to have us no longer be dockworkers? Let’s see, in rupees or dollars or euros…” The price she named was astronomical, almost an insult. It would have made Mogg a very wealthy woman.
Surrett guffawed and began to protest. Shura held up a hand. He shut up. Looking Mogg straight in the eye, Shura nodded. “I’ll double your number, under one condition.”
“Wait, what?” Surrett choked.
“You’ll… You’ll double my demand?” That threw Mogg off her game. She looked just as shocked as Surrett. She became suspicious. “What’s the condition?”
“I’ve doubled your asking price because now you work for me – you all do now – and the first thing you’re going to do is help me convince the rest of the Dumas residents that selling the land to me is in everyone’s best interests. And if they disagree, you make them agree. I give you half now, and half when the entire Dumas neighborhood is fully requisitioned to the site.” She raised her voice so everyone in the room could hear. “I require extra workers for construction, security to maintain peace, around the clock dock work, and hundreds of other positions filled. I will gladly pay all of Mogg’s people double the standard rate.”
Might as well triple. Their daily wages are so pitiful it would matter little. The rupee has been particularly weak since the war.
“I’ll keep that card in my back pocket to play when the time comes.”
Right away, she could see the greed in their eyes. Their fierce loyalty to Mogg and to this slum was shattered by her generosity. In the end, loyalty was simply a matter of price. Shura suppressed her smile; no need to gloat. Human nature was so predictable.
Surrett leaned in and whispered. “Adonis, that is drastically overpaying for labor and for the land. We can hire men off the streets for much cheaper. I have government connections–”
“You don’t understand,” said Shura. “I’m not hiring them to work for me. I’m hiring them to break Crate Town.”
Seventeen
The Game
It was a bold and exciting time for my kind. As part of our great expansion, I was assigned to a scout Carryall to explore this quadrant of the galaxy. My position on-board, as Receiver, was high in standing. I numbered the thirty-fourth out of over six million Quasing on board. Our purpose was to discover new suitable worlds, and to set up beacons to guide settlement Carryalls for colonization.
* * *
Ella spent the first few days waiting for Bijan to return, or at least come back for his stuff. When he didn’t, she began to ask around and came up empty. Word came down from Big Fab a few days later that a water rat, one of the many scavengers who lived on the beach and always smelled like fish, had tried to sell him back the same binoculars he had sold to Bijan, among other items. A quick follow-up and a bribe to the water rat revealed that he had acquired the binoculars from a fisherman who had dredged up an unrecognizable body floating at the mouth of Tapi River.
Ella tried to be tough about it and shrug off the news. This was a fact of life in Crate Town. In any slum actually. People died; bodies turned up. Nobody ever cared. You moved on. Besides, she justified, Bijan was a complete stranger. She had only known him for a day. Who was he to her, besides a friendly face?
For the next week, Ella was in a foul mood. When she wasn’t at the gym, she was constantly in a malaise, and moped around the streets when forced to go out for food. She found herself waspish and short-tempered, and quick to draw her shank, at least quicker tha
n usual.
Io wasn’t much help either. The stupid Quasing’s feeble attempts to make her feel better, telling her this was a cost of war, that people came and went, that she had better just get used to it, only made her feel worse. Ella thought this new normal Io was trying to sell her sounded like complete rubbish, even if it was true.
That infuriated Ella even though she knew Io was probably right. She had thought her Quasing would be more sympathetic about it, Bijan being one of them and everything. But then, Io wasn’t even the same species, so why would she? The alien probably looked at her the same way she looked at Burglar Alarm.
Ella spent those nights sitting on the catwalk with the dog, leaning against the railing and staring at the stars and that pretty white band that stretched across the sky. She just didn’t feel like being alone in her container. She even let Burglar Alarm nuzzle up next to her as she scratched behind the mutt’s ears.
That is the Milky Way.
“I didn’t ask you.”
Well, it is.
It had become all of a sudden too quiet in there. Loneliness had never bothered her that much, until now. Ella stared at Burglar Alarm and pretended the dog had died, and very nearly burst into tears. She looked away and berated herself. What was wrong with her? It was only a dog. Not even really hers. Just some stupid mutt that adopted the small space next to her home.
No, Burglar Alarm was her only friend, and the only living being in her life who had never abandoned her. Not like her mother, Old Nagu, Bijan, or her stupid good-for-nothing worthless asshole father.
I will always be with you too, Ella.
“Oh gods, that’s even worse!” she wailed.
The only thing that helped keep her mind off Bijan was her training at Murugan’s Mitts. Manish’s retooling of her training had made all the difference, and Ella experienced a complete turnaround from the horror that her first few weeks there had been. Now, she was actually enjoying learning how to become an agent.
For one thing, lifting weights and punching bags was only a small part of her regimen. There were days where she didn’t even have to lay eyes on a kettlebell. Instead, the coach had her throw things: baseballs, cricket balls, American footballs, chopsticks, knives and basically anything else she could get her hands on.
Ella loved it, and was fascinated by the degree of skill and diverse techniques required to throw things properly. From a full windup baseball throw to flicks of the wrists, there were so many different ways she could hit people.
Manish had called her a natural from the get-go, and she improved every day. By the end of the second month, she could pull a 250-gram throwing knife and hit a target ten meters away pretty reliably eight out of ten tries. By the end of the third, she could pull it from a sheath strapped to her wrist and hit a target within half a second.
“Release at the top of the arc,” Manish scolded, as he ran her through a series of exercises where she had to hit several targets in succession. She stood in the middle of the boxing ring while Melon and several other students tossed things up into the air for her to hit. Every once in a while, Manish would throw a tennis ball at her that she would have to dodge. For every time he pegged her, she’d have to wipe down one of the wrestling poles before the evening class.
Since these lessons began, Ella had had to wipe down every pole every day save one. That was fine with her, though. She was learning more now, and having more fun every single day than the first few weeks combined. More importantly, she was growing more confident of her own abilities to defend herself.
“Remember, it’s easier to loop your momentum than to stop,” Manish called out. “Spin, girl, spin!”
A ball bounced off the side of her head. She twisted to the side and let loose a throwing knife no longer than her hand. It just missed a Frisbee Manish had lobbed into the air. Ella looked to her left and flung another knife at an old boxing glove hanging on a rope from the ceiling. This time, her aim was dead on, and the knife sank into the glove. Another tennis ball plunked her in the shoulder.
“Getting careless,” Manish called out.
Growling, Ella made a big show of aiming a knife at Manish. She saw his eyes dare her to follow through with it, as she winded up her throwing motion, and then spun in a circular arc and hit a target behind her.
She looked back at the coach and grinned. “How’d you like that spin, old m–”
He bounced a tennis ball right between her eyes. Her eyes watered and she fell onto her ass ungracefully. She pinched the sting in her nose and felt blood trickle down to her mouth.
“I thought you executed it well,” he said matter-of-factly. “Now, get cleaning. The evening class is coming soon.”
At the end of the day, after wiping down poles and spacing them throughout the gym, Ella and Melonhead shared a meager dinner of lentils, mong and toor, and watched the advanced mallakhamba class from the back. Melonhead leaned in and nudged her. “You know, maybe you should give it a try.”
“Why should I?” She punched him in the shoulder. “So you can laugh at me?”
If her punch registered with him, he didn’t show it. Melonhead shrugged. “It’s good for coordination, hand strength, and balance. And face it, it’s a lot more fun than swinging kettlebells.”
That was probably true. As much as she vocally disdained the monkeying around, she was honest enough with herself to know that it was mainly because she was too self-conscious to even try. She was also shocked to see how amazing Manish was at it as well.
According to his files, he was a champion mallakhamba competitor before he became a Prophus agent. That was how he was discovered. In fact, many of our agents operating in India over the past two hundred years were former mallakhamba competitors, since the Genjix had control of the military.
Melonhead nudged her and pointed toward the entrance. “Is that your friend over there?”
Ella followed his finger and saw Manish and Hamilton huddled together near the front of the gym. Then she saw the old boxing coach pass a brown paper bag to him. Or it was more like Manish subtly and smoothly passed something to Hamilton and the tall lanky Brit muffed the hand-off.
“What do you think Manish gave him? Secret agent documents? Cash? A frozen liver?”
Why are you so suspicious and think the worst of everything? It could be a packed lunch for all you know, or diarrhea medicine. Hamilton has a sensitive stomach, you know that. Definitely a higher likelihood of either of those than secret documents or a black market liver. Besides, this is not the 1960s. Nobody passes around paper documents anymore.
“Then why is he being so secretive?”
Would you like the world to know if you had bowel problems?
Ella didn’t buy it. She decided to put some of her stealth skills to the test and sneak up on them – more for fun and curiosity than anything else. She slipped past the men and women trying to stay up on the poles and skulked behind the rickety boxing ring on the opposite side of the room until she was almost within earshot.
Unfortunately, Melonhead decided to see what she was up to and followed. Creeping was not one of his talents, and he attracted the attention of Manish when he slinked directly into Ella and knocked her off balance out of her hiding spot. She landed on all fours with a squawk.
“Oh hello, Ella,” Hamilton said. The brown paper bag disappeared from sight. “I was just talking to Manish. He says you’ve made leaps and bounds in your training.”
“Enough that I think I deserve a raise,” Manish said.
Hamilton laughed. Ella couldn’t tell if he was laughing sarcastically or if he was just a bad actor. In any case, the Brit pretended he didn’t hear the coach and walked up to her. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”
The man was acting funny; Ella didn’t like it. He was either lying to her or trying to trick her, or something else untrustworthy. He was definitely hiding something.
“We’re not done here yet,” she said.
“Go home, girl,” Manish said. “C
lass was over three hours ago. You’ve been staying later and later because you want to eat my food. Stop loitering.”
The truth was Ella actually enjoyed watching the mallakhamba class. The girls and two boys in the class were all so graceful. They seemed to be defying gravity. The more she studied their movements, the more she admired and appreciated the skill, strength and technique they needed to accomplish some of these feats.
Maybe Aarav is right. You should join that class.
“Oh, I could never.”
You will not know until you try.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You hungry?” Hamilton asked. “My treat.”
Ella had eaten less than an hour ago, but a Crate Town kid never said no. “Sure. Anything but American food.”
“All right,” Hamilton replied. “I managed to locate an expat restaurant serving English food. I’ve been yearning for some fish and chips.”
An hour later, while being served black pudding, Ella revised her opinion on the worst thing she had ever eaten.
* * *
“They caught him just before dawn,” said Wyatt through the laptop’s computer screen. “He had just moved from the eastern position and was heading north to take some shots of the river. He was streaming video to our relay the whole time. It caught the entire encounter. At least he got one before the feed went dead.”
Io and Hamilton were huddled in Ella’s living room as Wyatt debriefed them on Bijan’s tragic death. The Brit, true to his word, had taken Ella to a local restaurant run by an expat who decided twenty years ago to retire in India and open a restaurant that served English food and played football on the television around the clock. The food was a little worse than average, by Hamilton’s standards, but it was completely worth it for him to watch Ella gag for a change. After weeks of Hamilton struggling with the local cuisine, it was nice for him to have the tables turned.