Tales from the Edge: Escalation: A Maelstrom's Edge Collection

by Stephen Gaskell

  "Stimpson's drinks are real real good, hey!"

  "Monkey! What's going on!"

  The moment came in fragments to Monkey. Blood pooling on the granite floor beneath Boo-Coo, whose stillness as he lay there was absolute. The cat-eyed girl's throat bobbing on the vid screen as she guzzled Stimpson's. The crater in Boo-Coo's unbreathing chest, dead centre. Raz, frozen a few metres away, her mouth a perfect open circle, aimed at where the Securcons huddled over the body, sorting priorities, their bots going momentarily aimless. Mama's three little bots ticking unnoticed along the plaz barrier. The girl on the screen holding up the bottle again, her grin so perfect it looked like porcelain.

  "Enjoy Stimpson's drinks!"

  "Monkey!"

  "Raz," Monkey spoke into her mic, "you should go." Raz, still standing there, shaking her head, a sad dirty faerie.

  "They killed him."

  "Raz."

  "Boo-Coo never hurt nobody."

  "Raz! Go!" And now she did. She turned and ran, no longer graceful, just scared, her wings pathetic and fragile as they bounced against her back.

  The crowd in the maglev station had dropped to the ground or half-scattered at the shot. But now people rose. A murmur moved through them. It turned angry. Securcon bots postured up, reading sudden bad intent.

  "Monkeeeey!"

  Monkey stared at Boo-Coo. Nothing but an overgrown orphan, his body broken and small in St. Lorca Station's cavernous space.

  Just a dumb kid. Like her. Of no consequence. Powerless. Rage surged through Monkey. Boo-Coo'd never hurt nobody, it was true. But Monkey had hurt people. She was Sneak. She was Stick. The blade was in her hand, the same blade she'd stuck twice—slip! slip!—into Kalan Pleasure. The Epirian soldiers, under that armour, behind their silver faceless masks, they were people, too. People like her, like Boo-Coo. People who bled.

  Monkey moved forward, light and quick with anger, 'flaged and unseeable and aiming to cut someone. Around her the crowd began to gel. People started yelling.

  "Epirian gut swill!"

  "Ain't right!"

  "Somebody ought to put a bullet through you! See how you all like it!"

  "Fascists!"

  The Securcons fell into a line behind their bots, in front of the platform gate. They knew their business. Riots in Whitesands had come with the frequency of sand storms since the key execs had been evaced.

  It was the price of doing business, Mama Bot always said, a constant analysis: the precious tin and copper the Epirians still pulled from the mines up in the Cowslips weighed against the ever increasing threat of total revolt. One day soon the pay wouldn't be worth the bite. The Epirians would fold up shop and pull out. And then here they would all be, Monkey and Raz and Little Billy and all the rest, waiting for the end and nothing to do but look up and watch it come.

  The Securcons levelled guns. The crowd surged. Monkey let it propel her. She felt no fear, not like when she had cut Kalan and run. Today she wouldn't run. She would cut and cut—

  Someone grabbed her arm. Monkey turned, fierce, ready for a fight. A woman stood there, static in the crowd's tidal crush, dressed in a tribal shawl with a straw desert hat pulled low over her face.

  Mama Bot. She put her face down close to Monkey's.

  "Time to go." She turned against the flow, her hand gripping Monkey's wrist.

  It triggered some primal surrender in Monkey, being led by the arm like that, something from early childhood, lost to memory but easy and reasonless. The way Mama Bot pulled her, it was parental. Monkey forgot her anger. She let Mama lead, past the blankets and the vendors' scrap goods now strewn underfoot across the granite. In glimpses Raz appeared, moving parallel, all skinny bare limbs. Mama reached into the crowd, and now Billy was in tow, gripped in her other hand, little legs churning. Past the info kiosk, angling together for the same side door through which Boo-Coo had entered, the vid screen overhead looping the same commercial.

  "Stimpson's drinks are real real good, hey!"

  Madness had taken the crowd now, rolling through the station, feeding on itself, the incomprehensible rage of the doomed, at its centre a poor dead boy. Monkey cast a glance over her shoulder: somebody threw something, a piece a fruit. It bounced off a bot.

  They were out the side door then, the four of them, staring at each other wide-eyed, breathing in the hot dry night while overhead the gash in the night sky bled—that's when the Epirians started shooting.

  *

  "Interesting." Mama kept talking to her bots, or maybe to one of the spectral holo screens surrounding her in the harvester's cargo bay. "Oh yes, how did I not see that? That is an old frequency."

  Raz and Billy and Monkey, they waited. They never disturbed Mama when Mama was working, that was the rule. They were playing Terraform Wars.

  "That ain't fair!" Little Billy cried as Raz took one of his pieces off the board. His crew cut: a towhead halo in the oscillating light of a lantern hung from the cargo bay's ceiling. "That's my last drudge! I can't do nothing without that."

  Raz mugged at him. "Not fair, like when you took my mines, hey. Suffer, little man."

  "I ain't little."

  "No, no, you are little. That's why we call you Little Billy. I mean, damn."

  "She's just taking what's hers." Monkey, repeating something Mama Bot often said. This was a fundamental law of the universe, according to Mama: people took theirs. You either took, or you got took. All of human history could be summed thus.

  Except when it came to Raz. Sometimes Monkey helped her win. Like now. The two of them shared a smile as Monkey took one of Billy's mines.

  "Oh come on!"

  It was the waiting that got to Monkey. The waiting and heat and the constant vibration as the harvester roamed its aimless course along the desert's edge. This was their home, as much as any place was, where Mama Bot took them to hide out, when the city got too rough, when she needed to think. The size of a small house, the harvester was built for algae gathering, but Mama had retrofitted it with the plush scavengings of Whitesand's abandoned exec housing—and with an Epirian bot mind. In the cargo bay's darkness, she communed with it, saw through its sensors, gave it orders, the way she did her other bots.

  "Oh now that's fascinating," she said, and Monkey knew Mama Bot wasn't talking to her. "You should've shown me that yesterday."

  "Your move." Raz gestured at the board.

  "I think you got me beat," Monkey said, which was probably a lie. "You win." Without a word, Raz began resetting the pieces.

  Days they'd been in here. A sticky tedium in which memories of The Pleasure House had begun to plague Monkey. Memories of unwanted touch. Memories of Kalan. A habitual and breathless fear would settle on her when Mama's cloying bots came near.

  Waiting. Waiting for night to come and for Kalan to usher customers to her cot. Waiting for the city to grow calm after the station riot. Waiting for the sky to tear itself open. Waiting for Mama Bot to conjure another plan. The waiting was the same, then as now, like The Pleasure House had left its dread in her bones. Her body would go tight. Her heart would pound. She would tremble—until her fingers worked their way along her forearm to touch the edge of the blade Mama Bot had given her, its hard edge her connection to the moment. She would remind herself The Pleasure House was in the past: Mama Bot had gotten her the hell out of there.

  "No, I think you're wrong about that one," Mama said to a bot perched on her shoulder. She sat cross legged on a thick rug, the gravitation centre around which her half dozen holo screens orbited.

  On two of those holoscreens played looped coverage of the station riots. On one, St. Lorca station, shown from the outside. Smoke rose through the open front doors, filled the plaz dome like a giant drinking bulb, the sort of pink coughing smoke Epirians used for putting down riots. People scattered like sand fleas.

  Epirian talking heads, symmetrical faces with astonishingly precise hairstyles, condemned a violent terrorist attack by the Broken on Craster. Several offworld tourists had
been killed, people who mattered, from places that mattered. Monkey knew enough to understand this was the news percolating out into the galaxy.

  The other holo showed St. Lorca, too, but from inside, the moment things got heavy. This was Dom Chivo's pirate feed. Its view showed the crowd, surging. The Epirian soldiers and their bots levelling guns and unleashing, relentless, systematic. Bodies falling, Crasterites and tourists both. Dry cornstalks breaking under a hard gust. A massacre. It was, by Monkey's estimation, the truth.

  Dom Chivo was the only talking head on this feed, bearded and furious and orating, the way the mad Karist priests sometimes did on the Whitesands market corners. Stirring up fervour.

  "...not enough that we, the people of Craster, have been condemned to the Maelstrom. Condemned not for some ugly deed, not as some punishment we have earned. No. We are condemned here, to our doom, for that most heinous of crimes, that most simple of crimes: we are of low station. Our worth is too little. We are condemned for the sake of fiscal policy. Because we cost too much to move. We are condemned, we are sacrificed, in the name of favourable numbers on the Epirian balance sheet. And now...now, to suffer such naked brutality at Epirian hands. I say no. We say no. No more. We will not stand for it. No. We will stand up to it. We will stand up!"

  Monkey liked Dom Chivo's words. They kindled a familiar heat in her chest. The urge to cut someone, to make them bleed, like she'd done to Kalan Pleasure. Dom Chivo's words lacked fear.

  "That makes no sense," Mama Bot said, but not to Dom Chivo. She was monitoring the other holos. Schematics, hardware manuals, long streams of code scrolled across them. Two of her bug bots clung to her shoulders. A third sat in the lap of her filthy landfarmer's coveralls. Dozens of her other bots crawled about the cargo bay, aimless, off her tether.

  "Oh. Oh yes, now I see. Very interesting." Like Mama was talking to herself. "No. Yes. Yes, show me that." A flick of her finger and one screen froze. A diagram hovered there, what looked like a wave, but intricate and with math written all over it. Mama Bot smiled. "Oh yes. Aren't you such a smart little bot," and with a fingertip she scratched the bot in her lap, like it was a pet. "Yes you are. You are."

  "Stand up!" Dom Chivo, simply chanting now over the feed. Stand up, stand up! His words had tickled their way inside Monkey, a hot itch now. She kept fingering the knife. Stand up, stand up!

  Monkey stood up.

  "Mama."

  Mama Bot blinked. "Yes, my monkey?"

  "You think we maybe ought to join him?"

  "Certainly, Monkey." Mama Bot thought about it for a second, then peered at Monkey through the holofeed. "Join who?" Her eyes, which seemed always unfocused, aiming out into the world but watching only the thoughts of the mind behind them, until those moments when they needled into Monkey—they followed Monkey's gaze and fixed themselves on Dom Chivo's luminous apparition, noticing him maybe for the first time. She laughed.

  "Oh no. No, we definitely won't be joining him, Monkey. He's an idiot."

  "But he wants to fight."

  "And so do you, my monkey, I know." Mama gave Monkey a sweet smile. It made Monkey feel real stupid. "It's your nature. You would've gone right at those bots and their handlers in the station if I hadn't got hold of you. And do you know what? That's perfect, you being how you are. It's what brought you to me. And I am so glad you're here. You're like Poxy." Mama waved a hand, indicating one or another of the bug bots crawling about the cargo bay. Monkey couldn't tell them apart. "Such a defiant little bug. Not very bright, but stubborn, lots of moxie. She's one of my favourites, just like you."

  "He wants to get us off Craster. Maybe he can help us. Maybe we can help him."

  Stand up! Stand up!

  A flick of Mama's fingers and Dom Chivo went mute. Another flick and her bots scattered from her. She leaned forward, nose to nose with the image of Dom Chivo, considering him.

  "It was the Epirians," she told Monkey, "who gave Dom Chivo his position among the Broken. He doesn't know this of course, but they do everything in their power to keep him in place. His capacities are limited, and fully known to them." Mama Bot knew things like this, from when she'd been with the Epirians. She'd left, or they'd kicked her out, it was never exactly clear. Irreconcilable differences, and whenever she said this there was acid in her tone. She'd worked in their intelligence corps—said this meant dealing with information, but to Monkey it just meant Mama was smart. She knew things. Mama Bot had serious qualies. "Chivo has charisma, and he's authentic. But he confuses getting off this backwater with beating the Epirians. He's blunt, I understand why he speaks to you. He wants to pick a fight, but it's the sort of fight he can only lose. Firepower. Funding. Bodies in the field. These are Epirian measures of power, and by that measure they are unquestionably supreme. And they know it. They have Dom Chivo quantified. They know with some precision what his rebellion is likely to cost them. It's all part of their balance sheet, he's absolutely right about that. And when this planet ceases to be worth their effort, the Epirians will leave, and here we all will be stuck. What Dom Chivo doesn't realize, his every victory undermines his ultimate goal. He hopes to force the Epirians into negotiating an evacuation. But the harder Chivo fights, the more it costs the Epirians, and the sooner they give up on this place. Even if he wins, he loses." With an index finger Mama tickled the tip of Chivo's holo beard. "Poor man."

  "At least he's fighting, Mama."

  Mama's eyes zeroed on Monkey. "Let me ask you a question. When you stabbed Kalan Pleasure, did you come at him straight on? Or did you wait until he wasn't looking?"

  Monkey's hand went reflexively to the knife on her forearm. Her memory of Kalan...his neck long and his shoulders slender, exaggerated femininity, his kimono in The Pleasure House blue lights the colour of hammered tin. He'd been looking up into the face of an off duty Securcon, their words muted by thick mellow bass, when Monkey had cut him. Slip, slip—twice, the blade into the small of the back and upwards, towards the kidneys, the heart, aiming to kill. Kalan's body going rigid—he'd screamed, Monkey was sure, but she couldn't hear it. All she remembered was the bass, so loud it was like fluid, like being under water, the blood immediate, spreading across silver silk.

  "You stabbed him in the back," Mama Bot stated, a fact. "You did the right thing. You're smart. He was stronger than you. He would've killed you if you'd come straight at him. Instead you made the battlefield yours." She turned back to the screens, her point apparently made. No longer looking at Monkey, she said, "Food," and waited, engrossed once more in the holos, hand out and palm up, waiting, while Monkey dug through a crate of stores in one corner, produced a protein bar, peeled it and handed it over. "Show me the Percom schema again." Chewing, talking now to her bots, which had once more coalesced around her. "Interesting...interesting. And these are the latest we have?"

  "That's cheating!" Billy cried.

  "Billy!" Mama held the protein bar like a dagger, aimed at Raz and Billy. "What have I told you?"

  "I know, Mama," Billy said.

  "Say it."

  "Don't accuse no one of cheating."

  "What do you do instead?"

  "Cheat better."

  "That's right." Mama's lips formed the shape of a kiss, like maybe she was going to say more. Instead she gave one sharp nod and let it drop. She was hard on Billy, harder than she ever was on Monkey or Raz.

  "Mama," Monkey said. A long sigh escaped Mama Bot, but Monkey persisted. "What are we going to do, Mama?" Mama's eyes planted themselves once more on Monkey. She took a bite of the protein bar, and after a moment smiled.

  "My monkey. Come here. Look at this." Mama's finger lovingly traced the wave diagram still hovering on one holoscreen. "This is the signal that went between the Securcon bots when one of them sensed a threat."

  "Boo-Coo."

  "Boo-Coo, yes. His Percom triggered their combat mode. It read false. And this," a second wave came up on the other screen, "is the signal the Percom sent out first, causing the gate to lock down. Ver
y similar. Red picked it up." Mama nuzzled the little six-legged bot, which had crawled up and settled now on her shoulder. "Didn't you? Yes you did. Who's such a smart little bot? You are. Yes."

  "It didn't work, making him swallow it?"

  "What? Oh. Yes. No, that was never going to work. That was recon. I was still trying to decipher their combat codes so I could override them. And the gate...and Red did decipher them. Didn't you? Yes."

  Monkey stared. Boo-Coo. She pictured the skinny boy bleeding on the station's floor, his chest cratered. An orphan, like herself, but grown older, a sham skeleton in the dead tourist's oversized clothes. He was one of Mama's, just as Rogero had been before him. A piece on the game board, sacrificed. Mama seemed already to have forgotten him.

  She told Monkey, "It's radio," and beamed like this meant something. "It's old. Very old. No quantum data bursts, not enough information for effective communication, but enough to flip a switch. Nothing anybody would be looking for. Very clever, but risky. Now that Red's found it, it's very easy to intercept. And just as easy to counterfeit. The station will open back up in a day or two. All we need is authentic ID numbers."

  Monkey began to understand. "Is it going to work this time, Mama?"

  "Oh yes." Mama Bot beamed at the wave diagrams. "Now I have it."

  "We're going to need another Percom ain't we?"

  "No." Mama looked at Raz and Billy, still bent over their game, then at Monkey. "We'll need four of them."

  *

  It was easier than Monkey figured it would be, getting the Percom IDs. A boy who'd worked with her at Kalan Pleasure's now worked at Uplift, the last civilian hospital in Whitesands. People with real qualies had mostly flown the planet, and the gaps had been filled with whoever showed up. The boy was now a nurse.