Scat (Scat's Universe, Book 1)

by Jim Graham

  ‘I know,’ Thomas replied, ‘but they still arrested him. And they’ve got Marvin, too.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘And it won’t matter that you have witnesses. They control the news, Scat. It won’t matter if an alibi pops up a little later—the damage will be done, already. They’re rounding up some of the others as well.’

  Scat didn’t know who the others might be, and didn’t much care. He paced up and down between the counter and a line of stoves, his face reddening with increasing anger. The Chinese cooks gave him a wide berth.

  ‘What about your old man and the other Old Man?’ He asked.

  ‘At home,’ Thomas replied. ‘Old Man Spelling’s at his own place. They’ve lawyered up. They’re OK for now.’

  ‘Then the focus is on me for the time being,’ Scat concluded. ‘I need to get out of here.’

  Thomas shrugged.

  ‘Well, that might prove difficult,’ he said. ‘They’ve closed down the dam wall exit. Unless you’re prepared to climb the rift and find a hole in the environment shield, you’re stuck in Go Down.’

  Scat let that sink in. He probably was stuck in Go Down. A lone heat source wandering around on the outside would show up in seconds.

  ‘Where are they keeping them?’ he asked.

  ‘At police headquarters, but we think they’ll be shipping them back to Earth to stand trial for subversion. At least that’s what the Lynthax news media is saying. If they do that then the independence movement is done-for. They’ll have lopped off its head.’

  ‘Don’t be so defeatist, Thomas.’ The tone of Scat’s voice was sharp.

  ‘But it’s a fact, Scat,’ Thomas said in mitigation. ‘Go Down is a small place. It’s easily manipulated.’

  Scat pointed a finger back through the kitchen door.

  ‘But Go Down isn’t Trevon, is it? Judging by what I have learned since getting here, the real Trevons are out there, on the Plain and elsewhere. We just need to co-ordinate them better, get them more involved, deny services, up the civil disobedience, that sort of thing.’

  Thomas winced. He looked uneasy.

  ‘But that’s what I meant about them lopping the head off the cause, Scat. They were the ones co-ordinating that kind of thing.’

  ‘Then we start from scratch.’

  ‘That’ll be hard. Movement is restricted. Communications will be monitored.’

  Scat stopped pacing and snapped his fingers in front of Thomas’ face.

  ‘Hey! For Jeeze’s sake, Thomas, start thinking like your old man!’

  Thomas reeled.

  ‘I’m only trying to lay it out for you Scat. I’m just as committed as my old man.’

  Scat changed the subject.

  ‘Why did they arrest Marvin?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I did, Thomas,’ Scat replied, not attempting to hide his frustration. He began to pace again.

  Thomas remained where he was. He tried to explain.

  ‘He’s one of father’s closest confidantes. Nettles’ too. He’s a secessionist, one of the group’s coordinators. By taking him out, we lose a lot of the continuity—and a respected personality.’

  That pricked Scat’s curiosity. He suspected Marvin’s involvement, but only around the edges, and something Thomas just said about him being a coordinator didn’t sound right.

  ‘But he was on Prebos until two weeks ago. How could he make an impact down here?’

  ‘Ah!’ Thomas began. ‘He was making an impact, Scat, on Prebos. He was to keep the place from falling apart when we made the declaration. Once we won independence, Prebos would still need to produce, but under a revised regime. It’s an integral part of our economy.’

  ‘But he was due to be shipped home when you made your announcement. He wouldn’t have been of much help.’

  Thomas shrugged, still looking uncomfortable.

  ‘That was a matter of timing and communication. The plan was a decent one, or at least sensible, but its execution was subject to factors beyond our control. We had to bring more Reps on board. It took a lot longer than we thought it would.’

  ‘And now they’re being shipped off to Earth. How sure are you about that?’

  Thomas shook his head.

  ‘I’m not. We heard it on TV. Much of what they’re saying is pure speculation. They have pegged you as anti-establishment. Even traced your history back to your early years to suggest why you’ve got the hump for Earth—especially your comments about the Resource Wars and your dislike of the corporations.’

  Halfway up the aisle, Scat spun around and slammed a fist down onto the counter.

  ‘Damn and fark! Petroff!’

  ‘What about him?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘He set me up, the bastard. He quoted the same stuff back at me on Prebos.’

  Scat’s anger was turning into a rage. He wanted to clobber something, someone.

  Thomas smiled weakly at the cooks on the other side of the counter, before turning back to face Scat.

  ‘So what are you going to do, Scat?’ he asked. ‘What are we doing here?’

  Scat kicked a cabinet door, and then made an effort to calm down. He began to think as a soldier again, not as a victim. After a moment’s silence, he replied.

  ‘As I said, I thought I needed to get out of Go Down. I wanted your help. However, it sounds as though Nettles and Marvin need help more urgently than I do. As you say, once they’re gone, Trevon loses its momentum.’

  Thomas saw a change in him. It was as though Scat had flicked a switch, just as he had less than a week ago, outside this very restaurant. Thomas began to relax a little himself.

  Scat leaned against a food preparation counter, flicking at crumbs, lost in thought. A cook hovered close by, waiting uncertainly for Scat to move away. Finally, and carefully, he reached across for a pot. Scat slid it across to him.

  ‘We need to break them out,’ Scat said, almost to himself.

  ‘We?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Yes: we. You included.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant, Scat. You said, “we”, as in you as well’’

  Scat sensed this was a watershed moment for him. He suddenly felt more at ease than at any time since leaving Prebos. He had done all he could do to avoid the conflict, and it had been an agonising couple of weeks. But now Petroff had pushed him off the fence, things had just gotten a whole lot simpler, and no matter what he did from now on, he could do it with a clear conscience.

  ‘Yes, me. If I wasn’t a dedicated part of this independence thing earlier today, then I damn well am now! I’m fed up with being farked over, pushed around, shipped about, hired, fired, redrafted, and framed. Petroff and that fark, Cotton, are going to rue the day they decided to play me as a patsy.’

  It then occurred to him that if there hadn’t been a proper rebel force on Trevon before now, a small band of secessionists on the run would probably qualify as one. However, he needed somewhere safe to hang out.

  Thomas offered to rent a small place in his name, but Scat wasn’t so sure. Eventually they would check the Irwin family’s financial records, and that would lead them to him. Then they would both be arrested.

  Instead, Scat asked about the bunkers further north up the valley.

  ‘There are plenty of them up in the forests,’ Thomas explained, ‘but they’re in poor condition. They’d need refurbishing just to get them up to survival standard.’

  ‘But doable?’

  ‘Yes. Most of the valley families have the spare equipment you’d need—heaters, fuel cells, survival suits and so on. And most of them are secessionists.’

  ‘What about security? Do they visit?’

  Thomas shook his head.

  ‘No. As I say, they’re in ruins.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that may change. They might feel the need. Are there many of these places?’

  ‘Hundreds, Scat. You could move between them. Then there are the unmarked shelters that father and t
he Old Man built even further north when they prospected for our rarer strains.’

  Thomas got a little excited as he realised there were, indeed, many places to hide a small group outside of Go Down, without freezing to death, that is.

  ‘Just how far out do you want to go? It’s a big planet?’ he asked.

  ‘Far enough to go unnoticed; close enough to cause trouble in Go Down ...’

  ‘There’s plenty, Scat.’

  ‘… then we need to bust Terrance and Marvin out of jail, get them up the valley, and use them as a rallying cry for the movement. Maybe even take some affirmative action to shake up Go Down. Make the outland settlements a very large “no-go” area for Earth loyalists.’

  Thomas frowned.

  ‘You mean terrorist stuff, Scat?’ he asked.

  ‘Not your average baby killing, Thomas,’ Scat replied, smiling at last. ‘Just your common and garden-variety attacks against symbols of authority, some civil disobedience, Trevon House walkouts and after-hours votes. Maybe even steal a buoy to get the message back to Earth, and maybe to the other planets. It doesn’t need to be violent. I’m sure Terrance will have plenty to contribute on that front. But if organised violence is to be done, I’ll be in charge of it.’

  ‘So you’ve given this a lot of thought then?’ Thomas said, pretty sure Scat must have had these things in mind for a while.

  ‘Don’t worry, Thomas,’ Scat said, thinking Thomas was being sarcastic. ‘I’ll put some thought into it before I sign my name to it.’

  68

  Thomas smuggled Scat out of Go Down in one of the family’s soft-track recreational vehicle. They decoupled and removed half of the fuel cells, leaving room for Scat to curl up. Thomas covered him in some survival suits, each with the chip removed, to reflect any scanners that they might be using at the dam wall exit.

  They need not have bothered.

  Thomas lined up behind an omni-wheeled cruiser, which a police officer finally waved into the Lynthax search bay. The officer then beckoned Thomas forward into the police bay before walking around to his side of the soft-track. It was bitterly cold and the strong wind pushing its way through the exit caused the man to lean backwards, awkwardly.

  ‘Afternoon, Mr Irwin. Sorry about this but we need to search your vehicle,’ he said loudly enough for the dam wall commander to overhear, winking at Thomas at the same time. Less loudly, he added, ‘They think we’re all bloody terrorists, Thomas.’

  ‘Good to see you, Birdie. I hear you were called out for that Booni killing.’

  Andrew “Birdie” Goosen pretended to check under the vehicle with a rod-mounted mirror.

  ‘I was, which is how I know it wasn’t that Scatker chap—whatever his name is,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a job to do, so here I am, pulling double shifts. I haven’t had a change of underwear since this thing blew up!’

  Thomas nodded. He knew many of the local Go Down City police officers. There weren’t more than 1000 of them. Mostly they were contract cops and less than half ever patrolled the streets, but a fair percentage had obtained permanent residency, and many of them had applied to be citizens.

  He was convinced there was sympathy for the secessionist movement among their ranks. At the Mayor’s Moss Harvest gathering earlier in the year, Goosen had strongly hinted at his support for the independence movement, although an outright declaration of support had been impossible. The police were required to be loyal to the government, and the government was meant to be loyal to Earth. Even so, Goosen had let on he was sympathetic, as were others.

  That had given Thomas a boost. It had made his family’s risky stance on independence seem more defensible, more right.

  As they were talking, one of Goosen’s colleagues manhandled a scanner along the soft-track’s body, not paying much attention to the jumbled mess of hunting gear and moss analysis equipment in the rear compartment. It looked sloppy from where Thomas sat, but from across the road it probably looked kosher.

  ‘Can you open the rear door, Thomas?’ Goosen asked.

  ‘Sure.’ He popped the lock remotely.

  Goosen took a cursory look inside. He turned over a blanket to reveal an empty dog cage.

  ‘Thank you, sir, and sorry for the inconvenience,’ he shouted from the rear of the vehicle.

  Thomas nodded in the rear view mirror as the vehicle lurched forward onto the main road. He added a wave. In no time at all, they were through the exit and onto the snow-covered on-ramp.

  They were free and clear.

  They arrived at the Irwin bunker in the middle of a fund raising dinner that Reggie was holding for a dozen or so of Go Down’s moneyed class. He had just gotten them to approve the wording of a letter they would send to representatives of the Inter-Space Regulatory Authority, the leaders of the Western Bloc, and Earth’s media, aimed at obtaining Nettles’ release, and they had just moved onto establishing a legal fund, should he be taken to trial. It had been a long, and tedious, two hour meeting.

  When Thomas entered the room and told his father that Scat was in the lobby, he had beamed a smile of relief, and without thinking, walked across to the dining room intercom.

  ‘Welcome back, Scat. Come down to the dining room. You can join us for dinner.’

  He then regretted it.

  His dinner guests weren’t full-on secessionists, they were sympathisers, and like most sympathisers, they were sympathetic when it suited them. As he returned to the table, he noticed some of them exchanging worried glances. Too late, it then occurred to him that they might feel uncomfortable in the presence of someone accused of murder; that they might consider murder a decidedly lowbrow and extreme measure, not at all befitting their agreed level of commitment.

  Hoping to undo the damage, he asked Thomas to wheel Scat into his study; he would be along in a short while.

  God damn these frivolous farks, he thought. I’m going to have to resell this whole thing to them tomorrow.

  69

  Khoffi Khan was anxious to make a strong second impression. His first meeting with the Earth Ambassador had not gone terribly well. He thought it was to be a private audience so they could talk about what was actually pissing these Trevons off, but instead he was forced to compete for the ambassador’s attention in a room filled with his young Turks; kids who didn’t think twice about interrupting him with questions, or passing him updates. Then there was that man, Cotton.

  He soon realised he wasn’t there to brief the ambassador, but to receive instructions. So he had listened, and nodded when he thought it appropriate, and was dismissed without getting to make any of his points. He should have been more assertive—he knew it—but he had spent the last three years being pushed to the back of the room, and today had been no different.

  But this evening he would get another chance; this time he was determined to make the Ambassador listen—without Cotton looking over his shoulder.

  In the hallway of his small three-bedroom apartment, he picked up his briefcase, brushed off some of his wife’s hair from his suit, and opened the door to the corridor leading off to the elevator core.

  ‘I’ll be back by midnight,’ he shouted to his wife, Ara, who was in the kitchen preparing the family’s evening meal. ‘Keep some for me.’

  ‘It’ll spoil,’ she muttered, stirring the curry over a conductor, slapping her eldest son’s hand as he stuck a finger in the pot. ‘Farrin—get your hands out of there! Go set the table then tell your sister that dinner’s almost ready.’

  ‘OK, Ma. But I can’t stay long. I’ve got English lit revision tonight, over at the Starlings place.’

  ‘It’ll be ready soon. How long will you be tonight?’

  ‘Just a couple of hours, Ma. It’s English lit, not movie night. I’ll come straight home.’

  ‘Be back by 11 then.’

  Farrin Khan was 15 yeas old. He was a bright young lad who excelled at math, played badminton reasonably well, and was just getting the hang of talking to pretty girls without blush
ing or seeming too needy. He was tall, looked older than he actually was, and gave the appearance of being one cool kid. He was also curious.

  When his friend, Simon, suggested they go down to the rear lobby to watch the protest on Second Avenue out back, he had thought it would be a fun thing to do. His father had predicted these protests months ago and often talked about the situation over dinner. This was his chance to see what the fuss was all about.

  They slipped past Stephen’s mother using the servants’ entrance, made their way to the service elevators and took the ride down to the delivery area in the side street between Second and Third. Almost immediately, the chanting hit them, filling the air and drowning out normal speech. The atmosphere was electric.

  The condominium’s rear lobby was on Second Avenue, but, to get there, they needed to mingle with the protesters who were using the side street to join the main attraction. Groups of them carried placards under their arms, some of them already held clumps of concrete in their hands or were carrying bags of glass bottles filled with liquid, rags poking out of their tops. Some held low-energy stuns, others held vicious-looking homemade pikes attached to the top of uprooted fence posts.

  Simon was grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘Wow! Looks like there’s gonna be a riot—just like last week,’ he said.

  ‘Looks like it. Won’t your Ma smack you up the head for being down here?’

  ‘Na! What she don’t know about don’t matter. Come on. Let’s go round back and get a better look.’

  He headed off, keeping to the sidewalk on their side of the road, trying not to get caught up in the growing crowd.

  ‘Come on. It’ll be OK. There’s a concierge. He’ll let us in, and keep ‘em out. He knows me.’

  Farrin overcame his caution and stepped out. It was getting noisier. It was hard to hear what Simon was saying. He could see a solid mass of people passing the end of the street. Second Avenue was filled with people.

  ‘Hang on, Sime. I’m coming.’

  ‘Oh, crap!’ Simon said, looking at the place where the rear lobby to his condo had been. ‘They’ve dropped the shutters. What do we do now?’

  Farrin looked at the aluminium shutters that ran the length of the building. They must have covered it up in the last hour or two.