by Adam Rakunas
Banks nodded. “Good. You see my point, then.”
“Did you hit your head during re-entry?” I said. “They’re gonna be in range in thirty seconds, and once they start shooting and that foam starts setting–”
And then I realized what the mad bastard was getting at. I cranked the launch around hard. “Everyone, hold on to each other!” I yelled. “Duck down low and don’t let go. You,” I said to Banks, “start throwing as much useless weight overboard as you can. Except yourself.”
“So, I’m not useless?” said Banks.
“The day’s still young.”
He gave me a smile, then moved about the launch, chucking everything over the side. I braced myself against the wheel as we barreled toward the skiffs, the clock ticking down to zero. I blinked the numbers out of my field of vision as all of the WalWa boats opened fire, their cannons bursting like kids spitting cupcakes out of their mouths. The foam loads sailed overhead, splashing in our wake and expanding into giant, marshmallow islands. The cannons kept going, every barrage sailing over the screaming Breaches, but all falling just behind us. The gunnery crews must have been going nuts trying to level their guns as we blasted straight through their flotilla. By the time we passed the skiffs, the deckhands were shooting their riot hoses at us, but they just didn’t have enough oomph. When the skiffs finally came about, they were stuck in the middle of their own now-setting foam. They fired a few more rounds, but the shots went wild and had that air of desperation I so love to get from WalWa. As I turned the overcrowded launch to shore, I allowed myself a smile.
“Are you one of the whores?”
I turned around. The middle-aged lady with the dagger stare was at my elbow, her eyes hollow in the dusk shadows. “What?”
“The whores who lure men down from the corporate side,” she said, her voice a broken pennywhistle. “I know all about you. I’ve seen the shows, read the manga. You people sell each other out, turning innocents into sex slaves, make others fight for sport. I know all about this place, all the flesh and sin.”
That was when I realized I was still in my underwear. No one had ever accused me of prudery, but damned if it wasn’t difficult to stay cool when I was undressed. I pulled on my clothes with as much speed and dignity as I could muster. “Ma’am, how long have you been working for WalWa?”
“All my life,” she said, indignant. “I was born in a company hospital, went to company schools–”
“–and consumed too much company media,” I said, stifling the urge to mention her coming out of the company gene pool, too. WalWa loved its Indentures to interbreed, since servility is a recessive trait. “There aren’t any slaves on Santee, except for the Big Three Indentures.”
She stiffened. “I was never a slave!” she cried. “I was free to work and buy what I wanted! I was taken care of!” She pointed a bony finger at the corpse on the foredeck. “I was perfectly happy taking care of those people, but Thanh had to keep dreaming! He couldn’t see what a good thing we had!” She turned toward the body and spat. “Where’s your freedom now, you asshole?” And then she turned on me: “Take me back! I want to go home! I don’t want to be a slave! I don’t want–”
I slapped her. Not hard enough to send her to the deck – as much as I wanted to – but with enough pop to shake her. She put a hand to her cheek, but she shut her mouth long enough for me to kill the throttle and climb to the top of the pilot house. The other four Breaches looked up at me.
“This launch is going to shore,” I said. “When we arrive, you’ll have a choice: you can go to the WalWa Colonial Directorate, where you’ll likely be tried on the spot for Breach of Contract and sentenced to spending the rest of your life working in the bowels of the building, or you can take a risk and find out just what life has to offer when you’re free. It’s not an easy choice to make, but it’ll be the first real one a lot of you have ever had. Until then, unless you’ve got a medical emergency, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.” I climbed back inside the pilot house and slammed the throttle. The launch lurched against the surf as the engines buzzed back to life.
Banks made his way back to my shoulder. “Not the best motivational speech I’ve ever heard.”
“Not the best one I’ve given,” I said, giving him a closer look. His pale face was as lean as the rest of the Breaches, but his was the only one that didn’t look miserable. In fact, he looked downright happy, his eyes surrounded by laugh lines. “You a critic?”
Banks’s smile broadened. “I’ve heard enough to know when they’re sincere.”
“What, were you in marketing, too?” I asked.
“What makes you say that?” he asked.
“The glaze in your eyes,” I said. “It comes with WalWa’s Sales and Leadership Program. They still using the needles?”
“Not in Legal,” he said, tapping the scales on his cheeks. “Well, not the little ones, anyway.”
He said it so deadpan that it took me a moment to realize he’d made a joke. Now I had reason not to trust him: lawyers only joked when they were about to screw you.
“You’ll have to forgive Mimi,” he said, nodding to the old lady. She now sat next to the body, gently stroking his wispy hair. “Thanh was the only thing keeping her going, and with him gone...” He shrugged, his smile lagging a bit.
“You known them long?” I asked.
“Two jumps,” he said. “They’re company lifers, doing botanical caretaking. I spent a lot of time helping in the gardens.”
“What, giving legal advice to begonias?”
“No, as a passenger. I can’t do hibernation.”
“No one should, not the way WalWa does it,” I said, and then The Fear tickled the back of my brain, sending icy slivers down my spine. You missed six o’clock, it said. Let’s remember your own hibernation… I gripped the steering wheel and focused on sailing.
“What’s going to happen to her?”
I cleared my throat. “Well, hell, Counselor, you should know.”
“Not really,” said Banks. “I covered real estate, not Service Relations.”
“If she decides to stay, her life’s over.”
“What, they won’t ship her back?”
“Maybe in the alternate universe you came from,” I said. “In this reality, WalWa pinches every penny, which means they’re not about to pay the gravity tax for some Breach who has a change of heart. She’ll be lucky if she ever sees natural sunlight again.”
This time, his smile actually went away. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“You do now,” I said, hanging onto the wheel as the launch bounced over the breakers. “If she decides to stay, she can get a job at a plantation as a staff botanist. She can open a flower shop. She can start a street kindergarten teaching kids about water lily filtration. Whatever she wants to do, she’ll be free to do it. That’s more than the Big Three could ever promise her.”
We puttered along, and Banks said, “And what about me? If I stay, what could I do?”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Santee property law makes a hurricane look orderly. You just have to pass the bar exam.”
“How tough is it?” he asked.
“Depends on how much you can drink.”
He looked at me, and I gave him a wink. What the hell. His smile returned, still overly broad and annoying, but it never hurt to groom legal talent. A future rum magnate would need all the lawyers she could get.
“Still, how do I know you’re not going to sell us into slavery?” he said.
“You’re just going to have to trust me, aren’t you?” I said.
“That’s what my recruiter said before they shipped me out.”
“Yeah, but did they ship you to a place like this?”
As the launch bobbled on the swell, a splash of water bounced off the hull and sprayed us. Everyone started, except Banks, who blinked, inhaled through his nose and said, “My God... does it always smell this good?”
“Every day,” I said. “Every single d
ay.”
Chapter 7
The sky was electric purple by the time we approached shore. Everything glowed, like it had been spray-painted with gold. “Wow,” Banks said at my shoulder.
“Not bad, huh?” I said.
“It’s almost enough to distract me from that horrible factory you’re steering us toward.”
“We’re only steering near that horrible factory,” I said. “And it’s an industrial cane refinery.”
“Oh,” said Banks. “That changes everything.”
“It should,” I said. “No refineries, no molasses.”
“And no city?”
“Worse,” I said. “No booze.”
“A tragedy.”
“Look, this isn’t Planet Paradise where diamonds and hookers bubble up out of the ground,” I said, zooming in on the beach to look for Jilly. “The only natural resources this place has are a lot of ocean and soil that grows sugarcane. The prices for sea water and industrial molasses are set, and with the way traffic’s been shrinking, the only thing that brings in extra cash is rum with a Co-Op seal.”
“You know I was joking, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and I wanted to make sure you knew I wasn’t. If it weren’t for rum, we wouldn’t have the cash to help people like you stay free.”
Banks cleared his throat. “In that case, I’m excited to see the lovely refinery that protects and supports us all.”
“Hey, there’s no need to go overboard,” I said. “The place is a dump.”
I’d told Jilly to wait for us at the north end of Sou’s Reach on a strip of beach that no one claimed as their turf because of its proximity to the refinery’s waste pipes. Sou’s Reach didn’t want to be responsible for the sticky, stinky mess, and none of the bordering Wards wanted to deal with the potential for cleanup. It was the perfect spot for a pickup, and I couldn’t help but grin when I saw Jilly standing there, a green and brown WalWa corporate bus behind her. The launch bumped up onto shore, and we climbed out into the black, foamy surf. The one-eyed Breach carried the body.
“You are getting such a raise,” I said as we approached Jilly. “But I’m afraid this ride’s a bit bigger than we need.”
“No worries,” she said, then looked at the ground.
“What?”
Jilly looked back at the bus, then shook her head. There was a squeak of metal, and she leaped back as the bus’s rusty suspension gave way. Three dozen burly, dirty men with no necks and grimy coveralls climbed out. It took me a moment to recognize the insignia on their left pockets: they all worked at the cane refinery. There was one more squeak from the bus, and a man in a shiny white suit hopped to the ground and walked toward me. “Sister Padma,” said Evanrute Saarien, “what are we to do with you?”
“Nothing, Rutey, if you know what’s good for you and your testicles,” I said, as Jilly ran to my side. “You OK?” I asked her.
“They were blocking the road as I pulled up,” she said. “Made me stop and let them on.”
“Were they armed?”
“No.”
“Then next time, step on the gas,” I said. “When you have ten tons of steel and they only have one ton of flesh, you win.”
“Sister Padma, don’t take it out on the girl,” said Saarien, his voice slick as a molasses spill. “How was she to know how we do things in the city?”
“True,” I said, “how could she know you hire former goons for your brute squad?”
I heard one of the Breaches gasp.
Saarien shook his head. “You would say something like that. Something that mocks our brothers and sisters in the Struggle against the harshest strains of corporate bondage.”
“Once a goon, always a goon,” I said. “What do you want?”
“Me?” he said, putting his manicured hands on his lapels. “I want nothing but to help these people and give them the opportunities and joys that Indentured life could never bring.”
“If that’s your way of saying you want to pinch them for your headcount, get stuffed,” I said. “You may have stolen everyone else from me, but you’re not getting this lot.”
Saarien’s smile didn’t lose an erg of energy. “Sister Padma, you really think they’d be better off in Brushhead? Cleaning out sewage? Where’s the fulfillment? Where’s the advancement? I can offer them positions that they’ll be able to move out of quickly and easily. How many people do you have toiling away in the same Slots?”
“That’s beside the point! I made the recovery, and that means I get to add these people to my headcount.”
“But you recovered them under false pretenses,” said Saarien. “I mean, really, Sister Padma… calling the police on my crew? What kind of Solidarity is that?”
“The same kind you used whenever you snagged Breaches for yourself?” I said. “You really think throwing more people into your refinery is going to make it work better?”
“Our output is the highest on Santee,” said Saarien.
“Because everyone else’s places are starving for the parts and labor you keep taking for yourself,” I said. “Maybe if you actually listened to everyone else during Union meetings instead of whining about what you need, you’d remember that.”
“Looks to me like you’re the one putting herself ahead of what’s good for the Union,” said Saarien. “I hear you spend more time trying to get in good with Tonggow than you do with your own people.”
I bit back a shout. “Rutey, what does it matter to you if I add five more people to my headcount? They’ll still be in the Union. Isn’t that what matters?”
“What matters is that you play by the rules,” said Saarien.
“I do,” I said. “And the rules say whoever makes the recovery gets the bodies.”
“Bodies?” said one of the old ladies.
“You are going to kill us!” screeched the other.
“It’s just an expression,” I said over my shoulder, but Mimi was already bawling, and the two semi-comatose old ladies joined in. I turned to put a hand on Mimi’s shoulder to calm her, but got a punch in the face instead. Not a slap. A close-fisted, arm-swung-way-back haymaker that had me seeing stars. I staggered, lost my footing and collapsed in a heap.
When my head cleared, I looked up at the Breach with the scarred face. Her one good eye narrowed. “Don’t you ever lay hands on her again.” And then she kicked sand in my face.
By the time I got to my feet and wiped the sticky muck from my mouth, the Breaches filed behind Saarien’s thugs and onto the bus. One of the goons had draped the dead Breach over his shoulder like a stack of cane. “Hey!” I yelled, staggering to my feet, “they’re with me, you assholes!” The goons turned, and one of them put a hand the size of a baby in my face. I slapped it away, which felt just like slapping a brick wall coated in meat.
As the bus rumbled away, Saarien leaned out a window and waved. “Thank you for supporting Sou’s Reach again, Sister Padma!” he called, holding up a closed fist. “Solidarity!”
“You bastard!” I yelled. “If I get my hands on you, I’m going to pound you until your brains are jelly!” I tried to give him the finger, but my now-throbbing hand couldn’t move.
“That wasn’t the picture of Solidarity that I’d expected,” Banks called out from behind me. I spun around; he was peeking out from in the launch’s pilot house.
“What are you still doing there?” I said.
“I’m not a fan of conflict,” he said, hopping off the boat. “Those guys looked like they were full of it.”
“They’re full of something,” I said.
“He wasn’t with WalWa, right?” said Banks. “Some kind of undercover thing? I mean, that guy’s white suit looked like something out of Corporate Recruitment.”
“That’s because he was, before he Breached,” I said. “I guess he liked the cut of the clothes.”
“And he runs a refinery? Shouldn’t he be doing, y’know, recruitment?”
“He does,” I said. “But he also has to eat, an
d that means he has to hustle, just like the rest of us. It’s not like the old days when you had ships lining up ten deep at the anchor, all of ’em full of crews waiting to jump ship. If we want to stay free, everyone works at everything, including the dirty stuff.” I wiped my good hand on my jacket. “Though how that son of a bitch keeps that suit clean is a mystery.”
“You don’t get along?”
“No, no, we’re the best of friends. That’s why I let him shanghai your buddies to his little molasses pit.” I patted his shoulder. “Come on. If you ever want to see them again, we need to move.”
“Where?” said Jilly.
“There,” I said, pointing to a sand dune just ahead.
“What for?”
“Better signal.”
From the top of the dune, we had a clear view of Santee City, all its lights now blazing in the purple twilight. I took Banks by the shoulders and turned him toward the Emerald Masjid, the warning lights on its spires fading on and off. “Your pai working?” I said.
Banks blinked, then nodded.
“Good,” I said. “Dial nine-nine-nine, then tell whoever picks up that you’re a Breach, and your friends have left you behind. They’re on a WalWa bus heading up the beach, toward the big green tower.”
“Why me?”
“Authenticity,” I said. “Dial.”
Banks shrugged, then relaxed. His eyes glazed over, then he repeated what I’d told him, giving me a puzzled look the whole time. “They just thanked me and said to wait here,” he said. “Who was that? The police?”
“Nope,” I said. “Nine-nine-nine dials straight to the local WalWa HQ.”
The blood rushed from Banks’s face. “I called WalWa?”
“Yep,” I said. “They’ve probably got you tracked and pinpointed as we speak.”
Banks opened his mouth, then grabbed me by the lapels of my deck jacket. “How could you do this to me?” he shrieked. “How could you turn me back in?”