And it was a performance; first night opening butterflies in the round on the wide stage of a mid priced family eatery. Lights, costumes and everyone knowing their entrances and exits; chefs breaking down in the kitchens and the gigantic animatronic ‘Momma Whoppers’ breaking down on the roof, her cheery wave frozen in an unfortunate fascist salute until Charlie climbed up there and hit her on the arse with a big spanner. Charlie was Reb’s tech guy, and she’d moved Heaven and Earth to drag him with her from Barnards Star; the company had been all for employing someone local and cheaper, but a good tech guy was like having God on your side. Charlie was not all she had brought with her.
“Sis! Carrie’s collapsed in the rest room; Stacey’s put her in the recovery position.” Damn!
“Can’t you pull a couple of rollers inside?”
“Fuck off! Have you seen it out there?” Reb hadn’t until now; she looked out to an impossible line of pods stacked three high, rollers swarming up and down the queues with orders; she was automatically dialling for casuals before her eyes left the scene, vaguely registering a pale blue flash which signalled temps arriving at the telestation outside. Dammit dammit dammit! Why was she always such a fucking hero when drawing up the rotas? Temps cost twice as much as a regular employee, even if they were paid half; bastard agencies sucking the lifeblood from occasionally shortsighted and overoptimistic businesswomen! Every shift she’d narrow it down to the barest minimum, furiously taking the piss with enforced multitasking and unavoidable overtime. She’d drop noobs on fry duty and they’d just have to deal with it, armed with whatever replies they could get to frantically hollered questions across seething kitchens. Reb disliked training; it turned two workers into one slow one and encouraged entirely the wrong kind of employee. She handled interviews personally, and prided herself she could spot latent superhuman powers in the most bedraggled and desperate of applicants; nine times out of ten she chose well and the tenth, well, the tenth would end up in a burns unit. Reb was in no uncertain terms a ball breaker, but she inspired devotion in her staff. It was the way she handed you a task; it was a vote of confidence and a statement of rock solid belief in your abilities containing just enough information for you to wing it if you paid attention, and in spite of yourself you rose to it and loved her for it. It helped that she paid well, and mucked in with the dirty jobs as well as the boss ones. Like a lot of managers, Reb received generous productivity bonuses if she kept within or exceeded targets. Unlike a lot of managers, Reb redistributed half among her staff; she estimated the added efficiency meant she roughly broke even, and it made her look incredible on company reports. It goes without saying the money meant proportionately more to a fry chef than it did to Reb herself these days, but she remembered a time when a couple hundred in used tenners every few months would have been life saving. Rebs’ conscience was clear; she was buying their loyalty, complicity, silence and family lives, but it was nothing that hadn’t been done to her and they could fuck off any time they wanted. There wasn’t a workplace culture as such, more a siege mentality, and weirdly you never saw it as Rebs’ fault you were still loading the Burg-O-Matic and taking orders an hour after your shift ended; it was always the customers’ fault, and the customers must pay.
Reb took her sisters’ tray and filled in while Emmy gave the new guys a quick boil-in-the-bag induction. A small boy kicked her in the shins and she wished she had time to find out what he was having and spit in it, but somebody was changing a baby at the table – an actual baby on the fucking table! She skids in vomit and signals one of Charlie’s lads for a clean-up before gently en-arming both clueless mother and swaddled infant and guiding them to the fully equipped changing facilities, ostensibly to assist with the disposal of the soiled nappy into the state-of-the-art laser incinerator but mainly to demonstrate the fucking place exists, Madam! A fanfare rings out from the walls to announce the first Momma’s Facefull on Earth has been ordered. This is a platter containing half the menu; if you finish it you get another containing the sweet, which any accompanying children are permitted to help with, and if you finish that it’s all free. The man has two sons, a daughter and nephew in tow who will consume their Momma Meals in silent wide-eyed wonder, free toys left untouched as their champion demolishes the mountain of calories set before him and wins them the most phenomenal dessert in the three systems. Despite valiant efforts by all concerned there would invariably remain a pile of multi coloured gloop which neither man nor child could face but it was a hero provider thing, ruthlessly exploited by the chain. Fathers paid up happily for their young to gain playground bragging rights for a few days.
Finally it is early morning, and she is in her tied flat above the restaurant getting changed. All Whoppers restaurants were built along the same lines; big square two storey boxes with a central kitchen downstairs firing out orders on all sides and tables arranged around the wide perimeter. Upstairs was divided between non-perishable storage and the Managers’ quarters; if the restaurant goes up in flames you burn with it, or the company will want to know why. The storage facilities were a preppers’ wet dream; Reb reckoned she could probably bug in for a year if the need arose, although dried Burg-O-Mix would get old real quick. There were even generators on the roof.
As technically and in fact an Area Manager now,[*****] Reb was on a pay scale where she should own a great big house somewhere; it was still on her to-do list. When she’d first gained responsibility for her own restaurant after what seemed a lifetime as shift supervisor, she’d noticed others in her role acquired new luxury sports pods more or less instantly, indecipherable personalised plate optional. Rebs’ mode of transport was a motorcycle; her mothers’ old Brough Superior SS100 Titanium squeezed into a hardtail frame, a classic chopper with flat handlebars and an exhaust note best described as commanding. She reasoned getting in hock for a years salary on a new vehicle would put her right back where she started, financially speaking, but accepted turning up for regional meetings with oil on her shoes and smelling faintly of burnt fuel wasn’t going to help her career. She found an old station wagon as a cheap stop-gap and it just kept on running; it was OK as long as you remembered to park out of sight and walk the last bit. She meant to acquire property some day but it seemed silly when it was just herself, Emmy and a free flat.
The baby sister will be out ‘til sunrise somewhere with her little friends, but Reb never worried for them; Emmy’s crew followed through the S&H eight years later, and as soon as she could pick her own staff she’d gathered them to her bosom. In the post secession disorder of Columbia they’d grown up in a vicious and fiercely territorial girl gang. It was no time or place to be a defenceless young woman, and the Sanford Ladies Night Patrol brought order to their neighbourhood after the police and eventually the army pulled out of the city. Their distinctive executions, a shot in the balls and one to the head in that order, were known as Worley Kisses; Reb had never administered the Kiss, but she’d seen it done. Emmy and her friends were bright enough to accept an alternative when Reb came headhunting around the drive-throughs and kebab houses they’d serviced since graduation, and they formed the hard core of her staff. Reb was big on networks; centripetal forces are stronger than centrifugal ones, because people work better with people they already know. They don’t even have to like each other very much, but obviously this would be best practice.
Reb can hear the receding racket of Charlie’s hideous old Diesel motorcycle already blatting off down the North Circular; she’ll catch him up on London Road before he’s passed Croydon. He claims his dad bought the bike from a famous musician who died soon afterwards; says the guy’s soul got trapped in the wheels, and you can hear his spirit screaming on dark nights when the moon is full and the throttle wide open. Charlie was good with bullshit stories and tall tales; he never told a half truth to deceive, but delighted in outrageous boasts and flights of fancy. Reb never had much of an imagination. Alongside her mothers old Brough she now has a nearly new Buell Orion hover bike, a sleek, qui
et but above all incredibly fast sliver of a thing. It was her one indulgence; an ex demo model she got for a song at auction. There weren’t many brands left as such, and those few were all long established. Big Government made a standard stamp of quality the only reassurance the consumer sought; everything legally sold had been in the hands of people who make it their days work to operate a switch fifty thousand times, and bitch about it if it breaks. The process of creating trust in a company was long, expensive and took no small degree of luck and talent so everyone stopped bothering. You can talk about the waxrat, but it’s just the name of the object; it’s not a brand per se although only one guy can make them because he holds the copyright. The Su Quattro Company, again, is not a brand. It is literally what the thing is; it is a company and it makes su quattro’s.
The gleaming Buell was a minimalist masterpiece consisting of a steel cross member with a seat, footrests, handlebars and not much else. All the lifters, floaters, batteries and gyros were expensively miniaturised and hidden away inside the frame; instruments and lights flashed into existence at a gesture. There was an optional ‘touring tank’ to back up the small onboard flow battery, but the thick sack of electric fluid looked like a colostomy bag so Reb just charged up every chance she got; the solar patch on her backpack was a life saver. Charlie’s first words on seeing the Buell were ‘Christ; does the rest of it come with a magazine once a fortnight?’ Emmy called it the broomstick; it lived on a permanent standby charge near the stairwell ceiling where it bobbed about lazily like a two day old helium balloon. Descending to the hallway, Reb hauled on the electric cord to bring it down; out the back door and into the night she sped, heading for the south coast where all the space rock was at.
Space rock was a phenomenon all of its own. You take an old style acid combo, and add as many weird noises as you can from as many mysterious electronic boxes as will fit on the stage. Songs were often two chords or less with theatrically delivered sci-fi and fantasy lyrics; they could go on forever as the bands were generally too wasted to come to a simultaneous halt. It attracted the nomads, the villains, the druggies and the bikers and drew these uneasy bedfellows together through trade; you could buy everything from a dream catcher to an armoured truck at these lawless horse fairs. Land was donated in return for a cut of the action, and word spread through secret channels; you had to be trusted.
Reb and Charlie are here for guns; they arrive separately and clock each other twenty minutes in at pre-arranged locations.
“So how many would you be looking at?”
“All of them, and the truck.” Nobody carries this kind of currency; what they have is unmarked gold and rhodium in heavy ingots which look like pig iron, but these can be melted down and the bulk of the dross removed. If you wanted to go further, the miracle of electrolysis would refine the bars to nine hundred and ninety-nine parts in a thousand; maximum purity. The traders’ eyes light up as he quickly calculates the haul, whacking bars in and out of a large set of balance scales with noisy efficiency.
Rebellion; she was born of it and named for it. It doesn’t need a cause, and it doesn’t matter what you got; it is a force in the universe of both entropy and order. Rebellion is Schrödinger’s history; you don’t know if the Empire will prevail or crumble until you open up the rebellion. It is the stress tester of civilizations and predator of unstable states, a virus which consumes false gods and builds immunity into sound governance. On a macro level it is as vital to life as the selfish gene, but it’s a bugger to get caught up in on the ground. Reb and Charlie aren’t soldiers, nor are they in any way political; they see themselves as equalisers, and they don’t care what your beef is as long as you’re the little guy. After a lengthy drive, they pull up at a farmhouse on the banks of the Mersey and decant their bikes from the truck. Charlie’s needs a ramp and much huffing and puffing; Reb’s weighs about twenty pounds.
“I hate these out of the way places; mark of fucking amateurs!” she grumbles as they struggle with the U.S. Diesel, and she’s right. Beginners always think they’ll be unnoticed hiding out in a rural setting, and nothing could be further from the truth; country people are nosey and you’re better off six feet from a spaceport, where people are actively trying to ignore one another. Shadowy persons unload crates, as a man who is clearly a badly disguised Angonist approaches with a wad of currency.
“Jesus saves, my children, but only Angon Duke pays dividends.” Reb shakes her head.
“Keep it for the Cause.” The undercover monk grins, and fans the notes.
“This is the Cause.” They never ran guns for Christiana again.
Some weeks later Reb is on her knees, scrubbing out a line of industrial ovens; it is early morning, and the cleaning crew has buggered off. She mentally ticked off the three main points; various reasons, none of them make sense, and they’re all bullshit. The sooner the company brought them back in-house the better; the contract was held by some British outsourcing giant who remotely and facelessly robbed workers blind, leaving Reb the only actual person their frustrations could be taken out on. She’s been at it a while and her suit is ruined but the buck, as always, stops here. Emmy has finished two and gone, which to be fair was exactly what she said she’d do after a just and proportionate amount of guilt tripping.
“But I hate cleaning ovens!”
“Don’t be so negative.” Emmy folds her arms.
“Fair enough; I’m too good to be cleaning ovens.”
“I taught you how to wipe your ass! You literally would not know how to wipe your own ass if I had not personally instructed you over many, many horrible months!” Emmy adopts an accent which sounds like a Canadian gargling golf balls.
“We’re in Britain now, old bean! It’s ‘arse’ here and tally ho toodle pip!” Reb’s serious boss/martyred sister face cracks, and she sniggers.
“Should I roll my R’s?” Emmy performs an exaggerated slink across the kitchen and glances back across her shoulder, lashes a-flutter.
“Only if cute guys are watching.”
Now Reb is alone in the deserted building with four down and two to go; a footfall outside reaches her ears.
“Reb! Are you in here?” Charlie enters and sees her kneeling at the oven.
“Don’t do it woman! You have so much to live for!”
“Don’t look at me!” Reb barks, tucking a greasy strand of hair away and hiding behind the oven door “I’m a skank!”
“Get away with you! Even kneeling in a dirty puddle you’d steal the heart of a Saint!” He crouches beside her and gears his stentorian bellow down to a low rumble “I know where to find one, if you’d be interested in that sort of thing.” Reb hands him a pair of pink rubber gloves.
“Get scrubbing and we’ll talk.” Charlie’s storyteller voice echoes superbly from the depths of a fifty litre stainless steel oven.
“The heart in question once beat in the breast of Saint Laurence O’Toole, but that was a thousand years ago and it’s now under lock and key in the basement of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. Every couple of hundred years it gets borrowed and returned, and this time around we’re to be the borrowers.” Reb hesitates, unsure as to how seriously to take this.
“A Saint’s heart?”
“You’re a Prod, are you not? What’s it to you?”
“Lapsed Unitarian, and I could start a war if they catch me; the Swiss Guard are harder than they look.” Charlie brings the colourful pyjamas of the Vatican security force to mind; it took quite an outfit to make someone with absolute authority and a seven foot spear look amusing.
“They’d have to be, and there’s no such thing as a lapsed Unitarian; it was only invented to give agnostics something to do on Sundays.” Reb ignores him; they’ve had this one out a few times and it never gets them anywhere.
“You’re at least from a Catholic family; doesn’t anything about this give you the heebie jeebies?” Charlie shrugs.
“Truth be told, I’ve long held suspicions regarding Saints. We burned
people alive for following a god of this or a god of that, but call it a Saint and everything’s grand; it’s probably one of those Illuminati things.” Reb snorts derisively.
“Yeah, like there’s a Saint of Thunder!”
“There is, and her name is Barbara Dioscorus.”
“No way!”
“Straight up! She does fire and lightning as well. Your man O’Toole, however, was a lot more than a Saint; he was Archbishop of Dublin during the Norman Conquest, and oversaw the reform of Irish marriage under pressure from Rome. Celtic society was governed by Brehon law, which allowed divorce by both sexes for a number of reasons, but the twelfth century saw Europe begin to bring Ireland into line.”
Lifelong wedlock had indeed become a cornerstone of respectable society, and though cracks could be seen in the twentieth century it only lost its grip on the cultural consciousness over the next hundred years or so. It is easy to romanticise this period, but like any rigidly enforced social structure it had a dark side; rape within marriage was not a crime in Britain until 1991, and a two tier arrangement of human rights evolved from this mindset which casts its shadow to this day. Whereas mating for life enabled administration of the vast Church by keeping lands and wealth in handy family units, it locked people into a predestined path with little room to manoeuvre. The change, when it came, wasn’t religious or even cultural; it was technological. Electronic accounting kept tabs on every last penny in your pocket, from the moment you earned it to the time and place you spent it; whole life marriage had served its purpose and gave way, in the main, to serial monogamy.
The Only War Page 13