by Alec Saracen
He found what looked like a bedroom and, too tired – let's be honest, he thought muzzily, too lazy – to do it himself, had Ceq and Sam shift his cases there. The sleeping bag and bedroll were surprisingly comfortable, he remembered thinking, and the next he knew it was approaching noon the next day.
“Have a look at this, boss,” Tetaine called, as Zhai wandered through the communal area with a flask of industrial-strength coffee. Apparently, someone had brought a sofa. Zhai sat down next to Tetaine, their combined bulk giving it cause to groan. Tetaine was still wearing the same clothes from last night, and from the bags under his eyes it didn't look like he'd slept. “Fleischer got us onto the illegal network.”
“–still refusing to discuss the war between the Unfree Planetary Alliance and the Coalition,” chirped an unseen announcer over slick graphics depicting the combatants' emblems clashing in a dramatic fireball. “Folks, I don't know about you, but I think that means one thing and one thing only.” The graphic exploded into a wall of flame, through which emerged a cartoon of a roasted bird emblazoned with the FPA crest. “The Alliance's goose is cooked! If they were winning – or even drawing – they'd be trumpeting it from the rooftops! Their propaganda screens would be screaming it for days on end. Silence is incriminating, and the longer it goes on, the more obvious it is that the Alliance – has – lost! These are exciting times, my friends! Great days are ahead for Tor! At last, freedom from the iron grip of the Alliance is within reach, and it's up to us to reach out and take it!”
Tetaine muted the feed. Colourful images continued to pop up in silence. “This is Roshi Comet,” he said. “Most popular news feed on the net.”
Zhai shook his head and sipped his coffee. “If I were the government, I wouldn't be too worried.”
“He isn't a runaway leader. He's only a few percentage points ahead of number two. Number three's light years behind the pair of them.” Tetaine tapped his watch, and the feed changed. This time the graphics were more sober, flipping between bar charts, maps of the Void with states marked in different colours, text quotations, and quick snatches of video footage. Tetaine unmuted it.
“–fact that for every day the blockade continues, Tor's economy shrinks by another one-fifth of a percentage point,” a neutral, synthetic voice said. Even the gender was unclear. “For decades, Tor has imported food from other worlds, especially from Plenty. Tor's agro-towers are only capable of feeding 85% of the population on a permanent basis at current consumption rates, which means that once current stocks – believed to be approximately forty days – are exhausted, the only possible outcomes are starvation or rationing. This is the fate of Tor under the heel of the Coalition. When has Tor ever wanted for anything under the protection of the Free Planetary Alliance? It is the so-called Coalition for the Defence of Humankind which is choking the life out of Tor, not Governor Chang's administration.”
Tetaine muted it again. “TruthTeller. Much more measured, much more pro-government.”
Zhai frowned. “So why are they using illegal channels?”
Tetaine popped the lid off a deep can of crisps from his junk food nest and grabbed a handful. “It ain't all like this.” He tried a crisp and frowned. “Twins. That's weird. Should have brought our own.”
Zhai inspected the can of 'Kurls'. The brand looked similar to the Crackens sold in Coalition space, but when he tried one, he had to agree that it tasted strange.
“Goddamn Alliance knockoff crap,” Tetaine said, and ate another five. Through his mouthful, he continued. “TruthTeller is kind of pro-Alliance, but they'll still rip into it – and Chang. That's why they're so popular. Seems unbiased. Hence 'TruthTeller'. And because the FPA is the FPA, even if you're pro-Alliance most of the time, if you chat shit about the government, you get hit. Forced underground.”
“Good tactics,” Zhai said. “Cultivate a reputation for impartiality, and you can quietly be as partial as you like – as long as you criticise both sides from time to time. Any chance TruthTeller is a secret government operation?”
“...maybe,” Tetaine conceded, “but I doubt it. Hell, you met Chang. Reckon he'd sign off on something critical of his own administration?”
Zhai considered it. “No. Too vain, I'd say.”
“TruthTeller will take his side against the Coalition, but...” Tetaine shrugged. “That probably says more about what they think of us.”
Zhai took a long draft of coffee to wash away the taste of the Kurls. “I'm guessing we're not too popular here.”
“You could say that.”
“That'll help us in the long run, at least,” Zhai said. He gestured at the screen, which was showing projected deaths in the event of the blockade lasting a year. “What do they think of each other? This one and Roshi Comet?”
Tetaine laughed. “Oh, they hate each other. They've actually got special segments of their shows to tear each other down. TruthTeller says Roshi Comet is an irresponsible idiot and a danger to civilisation; Roshi says TruthTeller is a fascist tool of an evil empire. Et cetera. They've got a nice little thing going on. TruthTeller used to be more popular, actually. They were pretty much level before the war. Right now, Roshi Comet's on the up and up and TruthTeller's shedding a few viewers.”
Zhai nodded. “Makes sense. Political attitudes shifting. Chang won't last long at this rate.”
“It doesn't look good, that's for sure.”
“Have any more reports on the rest of the cabinet?” Zhai said, resisting the urge to append like I asked for. He had his suspicions about what Tetaine had thought of that request.
“Nah, not really,” Tetaine said, confirming them. “They don't seem important. Even Chang's deputy seems pretty out of the loop. No, I think the rest of the power players are invisible right now.”
Zhai clamped down on a flash of frustration at Tetaine's casual disregard for his orders, even though he knew Tetaine’s instincts were reliable.
“Power players outside the government, though,” Tetaine continued, “is a whole new kettle of fish. Here's a name to remember: Grigori Thier.”
He cut off the TruthTeller feed and summoned up a still image of a packed meeting, the foreground of the shot full of the backs of heads. At the front of the room, under a banner reading 'RESTORE' with the TOR in red, was a man frozen in the act of delivering a speech.
“ResTore?” Zhai said. “That's the best they could do?”
“I know, I know,” Tetaine said, “but look.” He zoomed in on the speech-maker, a rather unimposing tan-skinned man with an unkempt frizz of grey-tinged black hair, dressed in a shabby, ill-fitting brown jacket and corduroy trousers.
“Looks like my old political science lecturer,” Zhai said.
“Funny you should say that. Thier used to teach Modern History at the University of East Landing. He was officially disgraced and discredited as a plagiarist twelve years ago.”
“Which, I take it, was a political hit job?”
“Probably. Dr Thier turned to less censored channels afterwards. He took over the ResTore movement seven years ago, and it's been growing ever since. We don't have numbers, but I'd guess membership in the tens of thousands, maybe the hundreds. They're big.”
“He must be a hell of a public speaker,” Zhai said, peering closely at Thier. He had one fist raised as if in mid-dramatic gesture, and a thin curve of white was visible all around his dark irises. It made him look rather petulant.
“I'd say so. He's based in Landing. Since the war began, ResTore has set up rallies, marches, conspicuous acts of defiance, that kind of thing.”
“Deaths?”
“A handful. Disappearances, too, secret arrests... but they haven't goaded the government into shooting them in the streets just yet.”
“Good.” Zhai finished the dregs of his coffee. “For everyone. What does Thier want? What do ResTore want to restore?”
Tetaine grinned. “Get this: the original Torian constitution.”
Zhai raised an eyebrow. “That hasn't been i
n force for what, a hundred and forty years? That's a long time to hold a grudge – though I suppose the Coalition's still bitter about the Expansion Wars too.”
“In practice, it's independence they're after,” Tetaine said. “You could call them Torian nationalists. I've skimmed some of Thier's writing, and I don't think he likes the Coalition. He mentions you, actually.”
Zhai's gut tightened. “Regarding Naro, I take it.”
Something in his expression must have disconcerted Tetaine, because the big man looked away too quickly. “Yes.”
“We can use that too,” Zhai said. “Being hated has its advantages. There's always an angle.”
“Hey, that's your job, man. I just give you the ammo.” Tetaine made a mock finger-gun and fired at the screen. “It's your finger on the trigger.”
Zhai grunted in assent. “I know.” He glanced back at the frozen image of Thier. “What else do we know about ResTore? On a scale of, I don't know, fifteen-year-old anarchists to Yustrid, how plausible is their revolution?”
Tetaine absent-mindedly reached into the can of Kurls. “Stranger things have happened. Wouldn't bet on it, though.”
“Or against it?”
“Or against it.”
“We need to know more about this damn planet,” Zhai said, drumming his fingers on his knee. “Get a feel for it, somehow. I'd hit the streets myself if it wouldn't give Ceq an aneurysm.” He sighed. “I'm never going to see more than a few rooms of this whole fucking planet, am I?”
“Price of being important,” Tetaine said, shrugging. “At least nobodies like the rest of us can go buy a hot dog.”
“You can keep Alliance hot dogs to yourself,” Zhai said, then stopped, looking thoughtfully at Tetaine. “An ideaoccurs.”
The big man grimaced. “Why do I get the sense I'm not going to like this?”
10
Grey Hawk remembered a game she'd played in her teenage years. It had deposited the player in a stark dystopia of a city, perfectly ordered and regimented, with identical city blocks stretching to the horizon and infinite colourless people marching between them like lines of ants. The player was equipped with dozens of exaggerated weapons to bring colour back to the washed-out city, everything from paint-spewing machine guns to rockets that exploded into rainbow splashes.
It hadn't been substantial, just a briefly diverting toy next to the sprawling narrative-driven role-playing games like Heralds and The Gates of Time that had been popular among Grey Hawk's generation. Now, looking up at the uniform modernity around her, it was all Grey Hawk could think about.
Macard gleamed even on sunless days like this, but it had a sickly tinge to it. Queasy yellow-grey clouds reflected from millions panes of glass and struts of metal, smothering the city under a dry, uniform glaze. It looked like the air itself had been bleached.
Artificial cities could be beautiful. Val Yustrid had been planned to the smallest detail, and it was still an elegant confluence of distinctive districts and quarters, ordered where it needed to be and chaotic where it wanted to be. Macard was different.
Grey Hawk could feel the equations snapping under her feet. Everything in Macard moved mathematically. Thousands of sleek cars slid by, locked to their automatic grid, never deviating from their mandated pace. Every block seemed identical, sometimes right down to the order of sandwich shops and convenience stores. Even the pedestrians seemed uniform. There seemed to be no difference between those swallowed up and those spat out by the ubiquitous underpasses.
No block was complete without an enormous building-mounted screen showing the official, authorised news channel. None of the people flowing around her gave either her or the screens a second glance, but the newsreaders' commentary was audible as a low background murmur anywhere in the city. That was the idea, she supposed. Even if ignored, the broadcast was still omnipresent, seeping piece by piece into Macard's collective brain.
Val Yustrid had huge public screens too, but they were used only to announce plebiscites and their results every few hours, with the occasional factual news bulletin. She slowed down and watched a few minutes of Torian news, her disbelief growing with every passing second. This was a world at war, blockaded by the Coalition and cut off from the Alliance that had governed it for over a century. The news network didn't seem to have heard. Instead, they were reporting on the capture of a murderer and the surprise success of Weave, some kind of indie fantasy film.
Grey Hawk had the disquieting sense that reality didn't quite apply in Macard, as if the city had somehow made itself immune to the rest of the universe by locking it out, existing instead in its own ontological bubble.
She called up a map in her HUD to confirm her suspicions. Macard was built on a rigid grid system, that much was obvious, but she hadn't realised just how fanatically rigid it was.
They had designed a city in miniature, complete with one large park, one small park, a business zone, a residential zone, a shopping mall, a clutch of government buildings, a selection of supermarkets, a non-denominational religious building, and everything else a population of 10,000 or so would need. Then they'd copied it. Macard wasn't so much a city as a self-replicating patchwork quilt of identical districts, radiating out from the sprawling government district. Now that she looked, the skyline had a crystalline regularity, the same pattern recurring over and over.
Grey Hawk knew better than to stop and gawk. No sense in drawing attention to herself. But as she walked its changeless streets, the full extent of Macard's insidious evil was beginning to dawn on her.
People in Macard stayed to their own districts. Of course they did. Where else was there to go but other homogeneous districts? They had everything they needed. The equations said so.
It was a totalitarian master-stroke, she thought. If people stayed put, they were easily controlled. Soft, invisible barriers had hemmed them into what were effectively luxury concentration camps. There was no threat to the government in Macard, and there never would be. Macard's citizens had a city in microcosm at their fingertips. They were safe. They were satisfied.
Grey Hawk thought back to the hunger in the air in Landing, the despair and the anger and the raw desperation, and it seemed impossible that Landing could exist so close to this.
This was enemy territory. No, worse – this was the enemy. Macard was everything Liberation existed to destroy. Humanity was subjugated here, enslaved by vampiric economic machinery. Nothing could change here. Nothing could grow. Time itself had stopped in Macard. The city hadn't changed in decades, and each new generation was poured into the same mould. They were shaped by the system. It owned them, body and soul, from birth to death.
It was perfect.
All this was basic theory, of course. Grey Hawk had taken Architectural Confinement at age fifteen, and she had seen nothing new today. That didn't lessen the shock of seeing theory made practice, just as setting eyes on real homeless people for the first time had been almost existentially terrifying. It was one thing to be educated about the darkness of the universe, and another thing entirely to see that darkness rise up around you and blot out the sun.
She cycled through her sensors, looking for surveillance. She didn't have to look far. It was everywhere.
Sometimes the camera blisters were visible and obvious, even when they could easily have been concealed. That made sense. Half the power of surveillance was that people knew that they were being watched. The other half was watching people who didn't. By her reckoning, every public square metre of Macard was under at least three cameras, and that wasn't even considering satellites or mobile units. The sky was never clear of VTOLs.
It was the same in every shop she wandered into, in every underpass, in the cars, in the apartment lobbies. Security algorithms had probably already flagged her as suspicious based on the camera feeds. The simple fact that she wasn't checking her watch every five seconds was a dead giveaway.
The same principle applied to the police. They were immediately visible in their polari
sed visors and powder-blue uniforms, obviously armed and never alone. The visors weren't just the apparatus of centralised police control – they didn't need to be blacked out for that. Hiding their eyes set them apart, gave them an edge of inhumanity. You could connect with eyes.
That was just the uniformed police. There were others among the crowd, plain-clothed and silently watchful. Even if her sensors hadn't pinpointed the blunt outlines of their concealed guns, she'd have noticed the way they prowled, predatory, among the flock.
She tried to watch the people, but there wasn't much to see. Macard wasn't far removed from downtown Val Yustrid in that respect. People had their own lives to worry about. Listening into their conversations told her nothing different. Lunch plans and work chatter, love lives and low-key domestic arguments. War or no war, it was a weekday.
Still, though, some were willing to talk about the upheaval. A few times, she heard quiet discussions about the merits of joining the Coalition or the possibility of independence, occasionally even paired with open criticism of the Alliance. One of the most illuminating snatches of conversation she heard was from two women at a table outside a Volmais restaurant.
“Twins,” one said disgustedly, as the news screen launched into a segment on the announcement of a new watch by a Torian company called Lightstream. “This again?”
The other glanced at her over a glass of wine. “What did you expect?”
“We're at war,” the first said in hushed tones. Grey Hawk dawdled nearby, pretended to read the menu. It sounded unappetising. She'd never cared much for Volmais food even when she'd had a stomach. “They can't just pretend it's not happening. You see Roshi Comet this morning?”