The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  A car hired under a false name got them safely out of the embassy's underground garage, providing plausible deniability even though it could easily be tracked to Landing, but getting it past the checkpoints was proving to be a major headache.

  A kilometres-long traffic jam had developed at the checkpoints closest to Macard. Thousands of cars were trying to make it out of Landing to escape the unrest, and the government was loath to let them. As if you can keep it confined to Landing, Grey Hawk thought. Everyone knows what's happening.

  A tiny handful of cars were squeezing through every hour, with most turned back. Not everyone told to return was doing do. Rejected cars were clustered around the checkpoints, and angry crowds were beginning to form. They resulted in the checkpoint being closed entirely, which in turn saw the crowds grow larger and angrier. By the time they approached Landing, Blue Wasp's reports were growing dire. Violence was imminent, and the government's forces were spread very, very thin. There were too many ways in and out of the city.

  Any checkpoints down yet? she surreptitiously asked Blue Wasp.

  Nine at last count. More to come. Government's concentrating on the big highways, pulling out of the narrower routes.

  Which ones are down?

  What are you up to? Blue Wasp sent back.

  Grey Hawk hesitated. The others still had no idea about her pact with Zhai, and she preferred to keep it that way as long as she could. If she told them, the arrangement would collapse in her mind from a tenuous abstraction to grim reality. Even as she shared a car with Zhai, she could pretend it wasn't real as long as the others didn't know. She could pretend the true path lay straight and unobstructed before her even as she felt her feet carry her astray.

  After a moment, she sent the closest thing to the truth that she could: The cause.

  Blue Wasp's reply was immediate. Oh, well, in that case...

  She had every right to reach a private arrangement with Zhai. She also had every right to keep it from the others if she felt it necessary. The organisational principles of Liberation let her do as she saw fit.

  She had done nothing wrong.

  Holding onto that, she surveyed the map of overrun checkpoints. There were several options, and she presented them to the others. They slid off the highway and onto a succession of smaller roads, hunting down their entrance to Landing's labyrinth.

  Twenty minutes later, as they drew closer, the first cars passed them by on the other side of the road, bound for Macard.

  Ceq, sitting opposite Grey Hawk and facing forwards, twisted round to watch the cars disappearing down the long, arrow-straight road. She glanced back at Grey Hawk.

  “Guess you were right, Liberator.”

  Grey Hawk ignored Ceq's hostility. It was hardly unreasonable.

  As they crested a hill, Landing's skyline came in sight on a hazy horizon. Dozens of winding wisps of smoke were rising all across the city, merging over it in an ominous black pall. From their angle of approach, the grid of evacuation towers appeared to be a single solid mass, one vast grey block that dwarfed the rest of Landing. To Grey Hawk's eyes, it looked like an ancient castle dominating its village.

  Soon they passed the checkpoint. The barriers were jammed open, and there were no government forces in sight. The guardhouse sat empty. Their route into the heart of Landing was clear.

  Zhai peered out of the window with interest.

  “So much for the blockade,” he remarked.

  Captain Umbiba, the car's fourth and last occupant, was cradling his assault rifle like it was a beloved pet, his small eyes darting around as cars filed past them. The exodus was controlled enough that the oncoming vehicles were sticking to their side of the road. Nobody else was going into Landing.

  “Waste of manpower if you've got a city to bring to heel,” Umbiba said.

  Zhai gazed at Landing, frowning. “You're right.” He brought up his watch and opened a two-way holographic screen between the four inward-facing seats. “Let's see if their reinforcements make a difference.”

  TruthTeller was remotely interviewing someone in a hospital bed. Their head was wrapped in bandages that reached down to cover the eyes.

  “–four or five times, I don't know,” the interviewee was saying. It was a woman. The voice was the only way to tell.

  “How would you describe the situation at the moment you were injured?” TruthTeller asked.

  “Shit, I don't know. We were right in the middle of maybe three hundred people, me and my dad. It was meant to be peaceful, you know? We were just – singing–” The woman's voice cracked, and she broke off in a coughing fit.

  “Were the police provoked at all?”

  “No – I mean, I didn't see anything. We were twenty yards away, not even moving towards them or anything. I think they just started shooting 'cause someone told them to.”

  “Was it just pepper pellets?”

  The woman let out a short, bitter laugh. “No.” She gestured at her bandaged head with an arm wrapped in a clear disinfectant sleeve. “My dad reckons it was a gas canister did this. Split my head right open. I didn't see it. They'd already got me with the pepper.”

  “Thank you, Arith,” TruthTeller said. The woman disappeared, replaced with the iconic image of the violence so far: three young guys desperately dragging away the limp body of another man, all four of them spattered with blood, as two black-armoured troopers advanced on them with guns raised. In the background, a wrecked car was ablaze, wreathing the scene in chiaroscuro. “Information is limited. As always, we report only what we can confirm. We can now confirm that military police are opening fire on peaceful demonstrations in the streets of Landing. They have used both lethal and non-lethal force. At least eight military vehicles have been destroyed in the past forty-eight hours. The numbers of dead, injured, and arrested are impossible to determine, but all are high.”

  Zhai was tapping his fingers rhythmically on his knee as he watched. As TruthTeller's report faded into live footage of armoured vehicles rolling down a deserted, overcast street, he looked at Grey Hawk.

  “Did you see this coming?” he asked.

  “No,” Grey Hawk said truthfully.

  Zhai nodded. His eyes gave nothing away. “How about your people in Landing?”

  She had said nothing of any other Liberators to Zhai, but it was common knowledge that Liberators were dispatched in small squads. She wouldn't be giving him any information he didn't already have by answering truthfully. “They were taken by surprise. We expected protests, demonstrations, rallies, sporadic violence – but not this.” She looked out of the window at the coils of smoke rising over the city. “There was no sign of this.”

  “Flashover,” Ceq said. Zhai and Grey Hawk both turned to look at her quizzically. “You know. In fires. When it looks like there's just one thing burning in a room, but it's giving off invisible gases. It smoulders away for a while, and then–” She opened a fist and mimicked the whooshing sound of ignition. “Suddenly the whole place goes up in flames at once, before anyone knows what's happening. Flashover.”

  Zhai looked at her appraisingly for a moment, then nodded. “Perhaps you're right. We've been so distracted by all the high-level politicking in Macard – not just us, but the government too, and Roshi Comet and TruthTeller – that we ignored Landing completely. It only looked like it was smouldering, after all. Not burning.”

  Ceq made a noise of distaste in the back of her throat. “Politicians. You're like magpies.”

  Zhai chuckled under his breath, and said nothing more.

  Grey Hawk glanced at Ceq, who glared back. The bodyguard was a strange contrast to Zhai. She seemed to hide nothing, which ironically made her harder to understand. Certainly she wasn't stupid, though her intelligence was quiet. She was honest, but hiding nothing wasn't the same as showing everything. She disliked Grey Hawk, but for what specific reason? Was it that she saw Grey Hawk as a potential threat? Was it her all-consuming distaste for politics?

  Perhaps it was just
personal. A lot of people, from classmates to instructors to squadmates, didn't like Grey Hawk, which she had never taken as an insult. It was just a state of affairs, and if people looked at her and didn't like what they saw, what they saw wasn't going to change.

  Ceq, though – there was more there, behind her uncommon eyes. Why was she working with someone as morally bankrupt as Zhai? Grey Hawk made a small note in the files she kept on the Coalition embassy staff to probe further. Zhai's was already thousands of words long. Ceq's was a few short lines.

  Captain Umbiba, still listening to TruthTeller's broadcast with the volume dialled down, raised a hand and turned it up. An improvised bomb had gone off under a tank, and the hull sat immobile in a nest of flames as protesters jeered and pelted it with missiles.

  The captain looked pained. “Who let that tank get isolated? What were they thinking?”

  “Place your bets, captain,” Zhai said. “Stupidity or sabotage.”

  Grey Hawk cocked her head. “Sabotage?”

  “I suspect Marshal Cadmer is undermining Chang by overreacting to the protests. Either that, or they genuinely think this is how to restore order.” Zhai shook his head. “But even if it is Cadmer, what does he think is going to happen once Chang's gone? That all this will just – go away? He's setting fires in a paper factory to drive the price down. It's madness. And if this is the government's real, unmanipulated response, then there's no hope for them anyway.”

  Zhai was about to go on, but an incoming call distracted him.

  “Yes? … Right. … Twins. … Are we sure it came from him? … Ah. Then there's hope. Thank you.” He sat back with a sigh. “Fleischer says ResTore are refusing to meet me. We have no idea if the message ever got through to Thier, though.”

  “So what's the plan?” Grey Hawk asked.

  Zhai shrugged. “Try and hunt him down. Nothing else for it.”

  That wasn’t quite true, she thought.

  Grey Hawk made a call of her own, this time to Blue Bull. Rather than speak out loud, she ran her responses through a speech synthesiser, which was standard practice for Liberators whenever they couldn't risk a normal conversation.

  Blue Bull's replies came through in the same format. “Grey Hawk. What is it?”

  “Do you know where Grigori Thier is right now?”

  “Of course I do. Why?”

  “I have something to give him.”

  “What is it?”

  The lie came surprisingly easily, aided by the neutrality of her synthetic voice. “Physical files, crystal-encrypted so I can't upload them directly. Media protocols he can exploit to predict government coverage of the unrest.”

  The response seemed to take an age to arrive. Grey Hawk stared out of the window, hoping like hell that she'd convinced him. If she hadn't, there were going to be awkward questions.

  “ResTore's executive council meets at 448 South 2nd Street until tomorrow,” Blue Bull said at last, and Grey Hawk heaved a mental sigh of relief. “Then they move again. Thier will be there. He can't go home, obviously. It's being watched.”

  “Thank you,” Grey Hawk replied. “Let's hope this is all over soon.”

  “It won't be,” Blue Bull said, and hung up.

  When the interface disappeared, she saw that Zhai was watching her again.

  “Did you know,” he said, with an insufferable air of arrogance, “that artificial eyes twitch very slightly when they're used to write text? It's rather easy to tell, if you know what you're looking for.”

  “Do you think I care?” Grey Hawk snapped.

  Zhai made a vaguely smug gesture with his shoulders which, in a roundabout way, seemed to say yes. And he was right, damn him. She hated the idea of being read, of being reduced to a collection of tics and dead giveaways that could be deciphered and solved, and that was exactly how Zhai looked at her. Like a puzzle.

  “I think you're talking to someone, and Liberators probably don't have overflowing contact lists. If I had to guess, I'd say their name starts with a colour.”

  Grey Hawk's beleaguered patience tapped out. “Why are you saying this?” As Zhai started to answer, she pressed on. “Seriously, why? What's the point? You trying to piss me off? Just to prove how smart you are? Because right now, it feels like you're being an asshole for no reason to someone who's out on a limb for you. But hey, maybe that's the reason. Maybe you're just an asshole, Ambassador.”

  The ensuing silence was broken by Ceq failing to suppress a chortle.

  Zhai remained impassive for three long seconds before a bland, meaningless smile broke across his face. “Maybe,” he said. “I apologise.” No you don't, Grey Hawk thought. Snake. “Your communications are, of course, your own business.”

  “All right,” Grey Hawk said, willing to accept a truce just to be done talking to the man. His venality repelled her.

  Ceq was still chuckling away to herself, and this time when she caught Grey Hawk's eye her expression had pulled an abrupt 180-degree turn from hostile to sympathetic. Zhai looked idly out of the window as Landing rose up around them, and Grey Hawk watched him like her namesake. Zhai could handle being called an asshole. There were several more specific and accurate epithets she could think of, most of them courtesy of the archival Naroese news footage she'd reviewed last night, but their time would come. If they hurt him, good. If they didn't, nothing would. If you could still hurt a man like Zhai with words, it meant there was something salvageable left.

  “I know where Thier is,” she said, after long enough that she could pretend it was unconnected to the previous conversation. Silently, she despised her own pettiness.

  Zhai's attention had been absorbed by the looming grid of evacuation towers. He barely even glanced at her.

  “Oh?”

  “We'd put him in danger just by going near him. Call him, tell him where he is. He'll meet you on neutral ground then. It shows your good faith, but also lets him know that you could give him up to Chang at any time. Gives you the power over him you need.”

  Zhai turned his gaze from the cityscape to Grey Hawk, a calculating flicker in his eye.

  “You're pretty good,” he said, which only made her feel dirty. “Yes. That would work. Ever considered a career where your mouth does the talking instead of the guns?”

  Grey Hawk shrugged. “Why stick to just one?”

  *

  They met Thier in a small shopping complex close to downtown Landing, in one of the city's more affluent areas. That hadn't saved it completely. Though the tanks and armoured police vehicles were mostly confined to the chaotic iris of blocks around the pupil of the evacuation towers, signs of unrest were everywhere as they bowled up deserted streets. Windows were smashed or, where the material was higher-tech, dented. Occasional cars were burnt out. Paint, regular and smart, was scrawled across walls, spelling out anti-government and pro-independence slogans where legible. Discarded signs, cans, spent gas canisters, torn clothing, and other debris of the protests littered the streets, crunching beneath the wheels of the car.

  Zhai still liked it better than Macard. At least it felt like a real city, albeit one in the grip of a terrible fever. There was an organic quality to it which Macard was sorely lacking. Everything about the capital seemed to be automated, right down to the plastic people who breezed about on optimised pedestrian routes and through scientifically perfect malls. Landing, meanwhile, was clumsily laid out, dirty even at the best of times, and full of people who – for better or for worse – acted like real, irrational, emotional, imperfect human beings.

  Which, of course, was why the city was tearing itself to pieces. The government had made its decision long ago. Macard was the Tor they wanted, and Landing was the Tor they'd rather forget. The problem was that Landing had no intention of quietly fading away. All the government had managed to do was hem in an enormous enclave of abandoned, resentful people, kept in check only by the inescapable oppression of the Alliance. And when the Alliance disappears overnight...

  If it came to
civil war, Zhai thought darkly, the battlefield would be the grassy plains between Macard and Landing. Right now, he could see no way forward without bloodshed. Whoever had ordered the ham-fisted crackdown on the protests in Landing had locked in the course. It was an exercise in damage limitation now.

  They parked in an underground lot beneath the shopping complex, in the exact space Thier's people had picked. The lot was empty save for them and a few plastic carts. The complex was closed until further notice. Nothing was running in Landing at the moment.

  Part of Zhai suspected that Thier wouldn't come. Grey Hawk had been right: the rational response to Zhai's information – which, judging by the long silence on the other end of the line after he'd identified ResTore's ostensible headquarters, was accurate – would be to meet him. Zhai knew, however, that rationality was under ration in Landing. It wouldn't have surprised him in the least if Thier had strung him along to buy time to abandon his compromised sanctuary, calling Zhai's implicit bluff. If Thier didn't show, Zhai had no intention of helping Chang find him, but Thier didn't know that. He could only guess.

  There was another rational option, of course. Thier could have agreed to the meeting to lure Zhai into a secluded, confined place, one he wouldn't leave alive. Zhai was reasonably confident that death wasn't imminent, but his safety was not guaranteed, even with a V-able bodyguard, an SSA captain, and a Liberator there to protect him.

  Ceq was well aware of that. As the minutes ticked by, she grew visibly tighter and more anxious. She wanted them out of there, and Zhai could hardly blame her. If Thier wanted them dead, he would probably get his way. Umbiba, too, knew that they were sitting in a potential death trap, though he had actually grown calmer since they'd turned off the engine, his twitching eyes settling down into a steady sweep of the exterior camera feeds. He looked like one of his androids.