The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  Harod nodded. The meeting had left its mark on him too. He looked every one of his years. “You could practically hear them sharpening the knives under the table.”

  “I might as well have been throwing grenades. Would have caused less damage.” Zhai pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Well, we've rolled the dice. All we can do now is see how they land. Get us to the embassy, Sam.”

  “We're on our way,” Sam replied. Zhai opened his eyes and, to his surprise, saw that the car was already moving. “Anything else you need, boss?”

  “A five-star meal, a bath, a massage, and a drink,” Zhai said. “Any order.”

  Tetaine coughed. “Maybe lower your expectations.”

  Zhai tried and failed to summon the energy to glare at him. “Why?”

  “The embassy,” Tetaine said. “It, well – for starters, it doesn't have any running water.” He paused. “Or power.”

  “Oh,” Zhai said. “Terrific.”

  8

  Grey Hawk spent most of the next day underwater.

  Every half hour or so, she surfaced – not for breath, since her body could extract the oxygen from the ocean – but to get a clearer read on the situation. They were hunting for her ferociously, and whenever she surfaced she could always see the glint of aircraft lights in the distance, and the white thread of searchlights raking the water. Whenever one came too close for comfort, she dived ten metres down, deep enough that her stealth systems could mask her presence almost completely.

  Like most colonised worlds, Tor's indigenous life was primitive. Its flora had accelerated ahead of its fauna, resulting in what were recognisably trees and plants on land, but its animal life was still broadly confined to the water. The pollution of colonisation had fundamentally changed the planet's evolutionary direction. Humans had accidentally brought insect life with them, some of which had survived despite Tor's lack of biocompatibility with Home. Tor's seas were not untouched, but they were less damaged than the land.

  From time to time, Grey Hawk caught sight of something swimming past and stopped to watch, fascinated by the alien life right in front of her nose. Plenty's indigenous life had been all but eradicated on the main continent thanks to mass farming, and access to other landmasses was restricted to try to preserve the original life. But now, there were real, live alien fish close enough for her to touch them.

  She was here. She was on another world.

  Eleven hours after landing, having followed a deliberately misleading and randomised course to throw off pursuit, Grey Hawk finally approached land. Something resembling an eel flickered past below her, translucent and barely visible against the sand, as she swam parallel to the sea bed. It sloped up, and the sunlight overhead gradually morphed from a murky glimmer to a blaze of light.

  At last, Grey Hawk emerged from the water onto a desolate pebble beach. She stood there for a moment with her eyes closed, head tilted back to enjoy the spectacular heat, saltwater still streaming from her body. She allowed herself five indulgent seconds before she got to work.

  Four hours later, she made it to Landing. Blue Bull had reached it first, having had the least distance to cover, and Red Wolf arrived not long after him. Blue Wasp and Grey Hawk entered the city from different sides at almost exactly the same time.

  Grey Hawk ended up taking the train, having decided that was a better way to avoid detection than running all the way there. In addition to convincing fake e-papers, she had been issued with more than a million marks, which was almost 40,000 suns – it had been nearly 120,000 before the Alliance mark had collapsed on galactic markets in the wake of the war – and solid reserves of other prominent currencies, all untraceable. The exchange rate with the credit system on Plenty wasn't exact, but she knew it was a hell of a lot of money. Once she hit the nearest small settlement, she hired a car to take her to a medium-sized town called Teschburg, and from Teschburg she found a direct train to Landing.

  The grimy central station spat her out in the shadow of the vast tower blocks erected during the initial colonisation. Tor hadn't demolished a single one of them. Most worlds kept a few around for various reasons – museums, important pieces of history, sometimes even continued residential use – but all of them?

  Grey Hawk tried to imagine life in one of the vast grey fortresses at the height of the Evacuation. A hundred thousand people per complex, packed into tiny residential pods, ten pods to a bathroom and a thousand pods to a mess hall. A hundred thousand people, eating the same rationed, reconstituted food every day, surrounded on all sides by their fellow refugees, dumped on an alien planet as Home burned, not even knowing if they had truly escaped or if the Red One would hunt them even here, light-years from the only world they had ever known.

  A hundred thousand people per block. Grey Hawk stared up at the forest of forbidding grey monstrosities. How many were there? Two hundred? Three hundred? More?

  The blocks were Landing's central pillars, a uniform grid of prefabbed units occupying more than thirty square kilometres. The rest of the city sprawled out all around it, with only the old agro-towers matching the monolithic blocks for height. Over the years, the decaying towers had been adapted. Makeshift bridges arced between many of them at dozens of different levels, transforming separate buildings into a ramshackle city. From ground level, Grey Hawk could see occasional figures on one or two of the bridges, minute dots in the distance whose smallness only served to ram home the sheer scale of the blocks. Tor's population wasn't that much larger now than it had been directly after the Evacuation. A whole world had been crammed into those towers once. What was left behind?

  Aware that she would draw attention if she kept staring, Grey Hawk started walking. Landing's population was no more than five million now, and the vast majority of those lived in the city proper. There couldn't be more than a hundred thousand still living in those towers, which had space for more than two hundred times that amount. Imagining the isolation of that grim existence, Grey Hawk felt a sympathetic pang of loneliness. At least, she told herself, nobody was homeless in Landing. That was something.

  She picked up and decoded the coordinates of their headquarters from the agreed frequency, and got her bearings.

  Oh. Really?

  Grey Hawk stopped and turned. People pushed past her like water flowing around a rock, some of them muttering irritably at her. She paid them no mind as she stared up at the looming grey heart of Landing.

  Of course.

  The signs of poverty and decay grew all around her as she made her way towards their base. She stopped at a conversion point before long and changed ten thousand marks into a stack of physical plastic tokens, which she steadily distributed to the ever-growing number of beggars in the shadow of the towers. It was the least she could do.

  On the school trip to Star City, the sight of homeless, penniless people sat huddled in blankets under the station's glitzy lights had been a monumental shock to her system. She had been warned about the conditions of the galaxy outside Liberation, but seeing it first-hand had paralysed her. How could people stand to live on a world where they walked past that every day of their lives? It had made her feel physically sick on Star City, and if not for her Liberator body, the same nausea would have crept up on her now.

  This was the real enemy, she knew, not the dictators or oppressive states. They were showpieces and symptoms, not the true, insidious problem. Real liberation was freedom from basic material concerns. That was why Liberation sold Plenty's vast excesses of food to any government that would buy it, no matter how horrendous they were. To live free, people had to live.

  Grey Hawk forced herself to look at more than just the downtrodden. Landing would be the crucible of any revolution, and she had to know it.

  She saw police regularly, always in trios. They were all armed with lethal sidearms and non-lethal rifles, and all wore obvious body armour. The screech of distant sirens was never completely absent, and sometimes it rose to a chorus. This district was a strange c
ombination of crowded terraced buildings, isolated houses, and tall residential blocks, many of them abandoned. Half the shops were shuttered permanently.

  According to her intel files, the housing surrounding the towers had sprawled early. People desperate for somewhere to live outside the towers had taken advantage of the space and the borderline anarchy post-Second Separation to build thousands of slum houses, the materials provided by the basic automated fabricators with which the world had been seeded, and Landing had exploded outwards. As government authority reasserted itself, some planning had crept into the city, and in the wake of the Expansion Wars and the Alliance takeover, parts of Landing had been demolished and rebuilt along more coherent lines, but much remained of the old city. She could see the legacy of those chaotic years. Some of the crumbling houses were more than a hundred years old, and sometimes the tangled profusion of archaic power lines almost formed a canopy over the streets.

  This was a city that had been left behind. Rather than improve what they had, the new Alliance government had poured everything into Macard and abandoned Landing to its own fate. Grey Hawk could taste muted anger in the air. It encrusted the city as thickly as the grime. Landing had stewed in its own quiet fury for a century, barely maintained by an apathetic government, waiting for a spark to set it alight.

  This is it, she thought. This is where the revolution is born.

  Entering the gloomy grid of towers, she found that the generous spaces between them – usually at least twenty-five metres – were harder to navigate than she'd expected. Trash and debris lay everywhere, produced by and ripped from the innards of the blocks. Entire living pods had somehow been dragged out and left in the streets, and the paving of the roads was clearly decades old. The streets were crumbling and uneven underfoot. Occasional curved husks of burnt-out cars lay scattered like carapaces of dead beetles.

  Graffiti swirled across the lower walls of the towers, sometimes literally. A few up-market vandals had splashed out on smart paint, which blinked and shifted and changed colour. One impressive mural depicted a bug-eyed, screaming Governor Chang, folded over a literal barrel and being violated by faceless figures in business suits and high-ranking military uniforms, all sporting FPA badges. CHANG BANG, a garish caption blared, flashing from turquoise to yellow twice a second. As political satire went, it wasn't groundbreaking, but Grey Hawk appreciated the sentiment.

  It was quiet in the shadow of the towers. The ambient noise of the city faded to a faint background murmur as soon as she was past the first blocks, and only got quieter from there, penetrated only by those constant sirens. At times, there was nobody at all in sight. The grid funnelled the wind into the long canyons between the blocks, and from time to time a warm gust howled around her, amplified by and echoing from the huge flat surfaces. Overhead, a huge banner hung between two of the buildings billowed in the wind. The word RESTORE was splashed across it, with TOR in red.

  She came across one tower whose lowest floor was completely covered with posters and flyers, mostly anti-government and anti-Alliance material. The openness of dissent surprised Grey Hawk, even in such an obviously abandoned area. Had the government really just surrendered the area as a hotbed of discontent? Did they even know?

  As she neared the tower marked on her map, automated systems in her subdermal sensors flagged an approaching threat. She turned to see a hooded figure with a six-inch knife in hand, which had been creeping towards her and had now stopped in its tracks ten metres away.

  She waited, hoping her would-be attacker would lose their nerve. They were six inches shorter than Grey Hawk, and skinny too, their arms like twigs in the baggy arms of the hooded sweater. She adjusted her vision to zoom in on their face and realised that it was a boy, probably no older than sixteen. His eyes were shadowed by the hood, but it couldn't hide his apprehension.

  “Don't try it, kid,” she said, after a few seconds of silent standoff. She reached into her smartsuit pocket and grabbed a handful of mark tokens, which she tossed onto the ground between them with a clatter.

  With a suspicious, crablike gait, the boy sidled towards her and went to one knee to scoop up the cash, his knife still pointed at Grey Hawk. As soon as he'd finished stuffing it into his pockets, he straightened up and took a step towards her. Grey Hawk watched conflicting gratitude, envy, anger, and fear fade into an animal look of hunger.

  “Give me the rest,” he said.

  Grey Hawk considered it for a moment, just to avoid the conflict. She had more, after all. Utilitarian calculations clacked away inside her head. The kid needed it more than her, and others needed it more than the kid. Mathematically, she thought, there had to be an ideal solution, a hypothetical formula into which you could feed the injustices and the resources of the human race and which would produce a perfect answer. There had to be.

  The kid solved the dilemma himself. He took another step forward, and Grey Hawk read the intent of violence in his movements. Now there were only two choices. The old standard: fight or flight. She had no desire to hurt the boy, which made it simple. She left the kid in the dust, sprinting away before he knew she was moving. He gave a half-hearted chase, but gave up almost immediately. Grey Hawk rounded a corner and slowed down to a walk. The mark tokens, which had rattled accusingly in her smartsuit pocket as she ran, went quiet.

  “Poor kid,” Red Wolf said in her ear. Grey Hawk stiffened in surprise. The audio channel had opened up with no notice. “You shouldn't have shown him the money. They always want more.”

  Grey Hawk bit back on her retort. “You can see me?”

  “Up here.” Grey Hawk looked up and saw a figure standing on the very edge of one of the buildings, hundreds and hundreds of metres overhead. It raised a hand, and Grey Hawk waved back. “Come on up.”

  Predictably, most of the elevators in the tower blocks were broken down or had been stripped for parts long ago. Grey Hawk broke into the elevator shaft anyway and climbed up the cord, which was quicker than taking the stairs – and more discreet, since there were probably at least a few other people still living in the building. At the 151st floor, she pried open the elevator doors. They opened easily, and by the dents in the metal she could see that either Blue Bull or Red Wolf had had the same idea. She stepped out into a dark ruin of a grey, elevator-lined hallway.

  It smelled of decay and dust. There was nothing alive in the air. However long ago the floor had been abandoned, it was long enough that any human traces had long since faded into undetectability. In the distance, down a corridor, she could see a single functioning light, which flickered on and off erratically. Other dark corridors fanned out from the elevators, but Grey Hawk followed the light, based on the logic that whoever had identified the place for them probably hadn't had a Liberator's enhanced eyesight. Halfway down the corridor, she remembered that she had a detailed map, and quickly checked it. Her guess had been wrong, and she doubled back, kicking herself.

  Down one dark hallway, into another, over abandoned chairs, an ancient deflated football and concrete debris, she found the right door. Two sets of footprints led her there, ridged imprints in the thick dust. It occurred to her that anyone else who visited that floor could also follow the prints, though the forbidding electronically-secured metal door, obviously newer than the rest of the building, would probably put them off.

  As it slammed shut behind her, Grey Hawk took stock of the room. The most obvious fixture was the miniature fusion generator which would recharge their batteries, a tall metal cylinder that sat in the centre of the main room like an obelisk. Blue Bull was standing by it, plugged in, as she entered, and he raised a hand in greeting.

  The rest seemed to be mostly unmarked crates, some of which lay open, revealing their contents: grenades, explosives, specialist gear. In the next room, Grey Hawk discovered Red Wolf and a large fabricator, which was whirring away as it put the finishing touches on a standard-issue Liberator assault rifle.

  “Seven minutes, start to finish,” Red Wolf said over her
shoulder. The machine fell silent, and she hefted the rifle in one hand, collapsed it into its compact form, and leant it against the wall next to five others. The fabricator began printing another gun. “We're running basic equipment right now. Any personal requests?”

  “I'll think about it,” Grey Hawk said. She glanced around the dark room, which was bare apart from the fabricator, its products, and the crates of raw material which fed it. An indecipherable graffiti tag, decades old and badly faded, was scrawled across one wall. “Guns and energy. That's all they provided?”

  “That's all we need.” Red Wolf gestured vaguely at the main room. “There are personal chargers, too. Just plug them into the mains, and you can power up anywhere on the planet.”

  Grey Hawk nodded. She was watching the fabricator do its work, layering thin strands of metallic and plastic fibres into the familiar shape of a rifle with perfect precision. The shaping arms above it which were teasing the fibres into place reminded her of a spider weaving its web. “What's our first move?”

  “Waiting for Blue Wasp,” Red Wolf replied.

  “And then?”

  “We'll take stock of the situation. Usual practice is to split up, but Landing is fertile ground for us. The Grade Sevens will do good work here.”

  “And us?”

  “One in Ossaile, one in Macard.” Red Wolf paused, then, with forced nonchalance, said: “I think you'll be more use in Macard. Your stealth systems are better than mine. I'll have trouble staying out of sight. You won't.”

  Grey Hawk looked sideways at the Grade Six. Her eyes were fixed on the rifle taking shape before them, but her jaw was clenched tight. Admitting Grey Hawk's physical superiority had not been easy for her, no matter that it was objective fact. Grey Hawk wasn't unsympathetic. Any Liberator who survived more than a few years saw new generations enter the field and instantly outperform their predecessors across the board. The fate of a Liberator was death or obsolescence. Since Grade Four, the increasing neural rewiring necessary for each successive generation meant that porting experienced heads onto new bodies was borderline impossible – and not many Liberators lived to see three new Grades after theirs. Red Wolf was approaching the end of her shelf life.