Tales of the Republic (The Complete Novel)

by M. G. Herron

  The subconscious signal worked. Harvey shoved his bulk into the far corner, and unloaded his armful of accoutrements onto the bench between them as well. The water bottles went sideways on top of Khan’s jacket, so they wouldn’t roll away.

  Patience, Ming told himself. Wait for your moment.

  “Harvey, isn’t it?”

  The man glowered at Ming, but nodded. “Yeah. Hello, magistrate.”

  “Good to see you again.”

  The man smiled politely.

  “It’s a hot day,” Ming said.

  “The temperature in here has been nearly unbearable,” Harvey whined. “And how crowded it’s been lately.”

  “Absolutely,” Ming said.

  Khan suddenly began waving his hands, shooing away the reporters. They clamored after him, but Khan simply detached himself and said no more.

  Harvey pushed himself out of the bench and took his feet again, clearly uneasy. “Let me help you,” Ming said, bending low over Harvey’s things and scooping Khan’s jacket and the water bottles up with his own.

  “Thanks.” Harvey sighed the word out.

  “Oh, no problem,” Ming said. He handed the jacket and two water bottles to Harvey.

  “Harvey!” Senator Khan’s voice cracked across the echoey room. “Let’s go.”

  Ming waved at Harvey, and watched as the man half jogged half waddled to catch the senator, whose long stride took him quickly past the armed guards and down the hall.

  Come on, Ming said. Harvey fumbled one of the water bottles and passed it to Khan, who sucked down a stream of liquid.

  Ming grinned. He popped open the bottle in his hand and took a long swig of the cool water.

  CHAPTER 25

  HIGH ALERT

  The deed done, Ming headed back outside for a breath of fresh air. He would miss the beginning of the senate session, but didn’t care anymore as his mind was elsewhere. He kept one eye on his phone as he walked—according to the tech guy Ming got the biobug from, the app would begin to record after the subject metabolized the tech. He watched it for a minute, but the recording meter remained flat.

  With one eye on his phone, Ming gazed across the capital lawn toward the army encampment when two dozen uniformed police officers passed through the wrought iron gate and entered the senate compound.

  As the cops approached the Capitol building along the stone path Ming and Fuquan walked just an hour before, he recognized a tall, dark-haired man with broad shoulders at the head of the contingent. The man was pointing and ordering groups of cops to take up various positions around the building.

  When the man reached him, Ming pocketed the phone and said, “It’s good to see you again, Captain Wallace.” By this time, most of the cops were patrolling the inside of the property or were heading around the side of the building. The captain still had half a dozen men with him, who spread out and gazed around with watchful eyes as the Captain paused to speak to Ming.

  “And you, magistrate. Did you ever end up speaking to my friend about the biotrace on Ari’s blood sample?”

  “I did. He wasn’t able to do it, in the end, but he was very helpful in any case.” For something else. Ming fingered the phone in his pocket but didn’t pull it out.

  “Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Ming said. “I appreciate the recommendation. Your friend’s done good business in the past couple weeks.”

  “People think technology will solve all their problems. Especially in desperate times like these.”

  Ming gestured to the cops behind Wallace. “What’s going on here?”

  “General’s orders. He’s put the whole city on high alert, and my precinct got placed at the Capitol. General Greif says that the memorial for those who were killed yesterday is only a temporary respite in the riots, and he’s probably right. The rebels have been too quiet for my taste. Everyone expects them to push their advantage while they have it. So we’re here to provide extra security for the Capitol. Secret Service was never designed to be stretched so thin, and they need all the help they can get. And with the protests so close to the Capitol now…”

  “I understand. It make sense to be careful.”

  “Exactly.”

  The door burst open behind Ming. It was Bohai, breathless and red in the face. He braced himself on his knees. “Ming! You have to come with me.”

  Wallace’s hand—and the hands of the half dozen cops behind him—jumped reflexively to his sidearm.

  “Whoa.” Bohai raised himself up and showed his palms. The cops slowly relaxed.

  “Bohai, what’s going on?”

  “It’s Senator Fuquan. You have to come with me.”

  CHAPTER 26

  FILIBUSTER

  As they hurried to the senate, Bohai filled Ming in on the details.

  “It started the way you’d expect—Khan pushing that martial-law-disguised-as-security bill, and Fuquan’s faction fighting it. But when it looked like Khan might get the upper hand, Fuquan came out swinging with accusations of negligence. I don’t know where she got them, but—”

  “I gave them to her.”

  “What? Why?” His face blanched. “That’s what was in your files.”

  Ming shrugged. “You wouldn’t help me.”

  Bohai huffed a heavy breath out through his nose as they turned a corner and headed toward the senate.

  The ruckus of voices could be heard down the hall even with the door closed. There was shouting, the sound of feet stomping, the rap of a gavel on wood.

  “What you were proposing—”

  Ming cut him off. ”I’ll take the fall.”

  “And Fuquan was okay with that?”

  “I didn’t tell her about the biobug. I just gave her the file and asked her to look into it. I didn’t know she would take action so soon.”

  “Well it’s out in the open now. I hope you’re ready.”

  Bohai threw open the door to the senate, and he and Ming walked into a battery of noise. Everyone was yelling at once. Words flew up the wall over the vice president’s head as the automatic dictation tried its best to capture as many voices as it could. But the computer had limits, and during the clamor the text was a garbled mess of insults and shouts of “Order!” from the vice president.

  Senator Fuquan stood on the floor, rattling off figures and dates that were practically swallowed in the din.

  “On June 1st, a shipment of rations arrived—short three kilos. On July 2nd, the shipment failed to arrive. On July 10th, a shipment arrived that was short by five kilos, and several days late. On October 2nd…”

  Khan stood at his seat and pointed at Fuquan. “How dare you accuse me! You know nothing about the situation. Nothing!”

  The vice president gripped the microphone on his desk and shouted into it, “Sit down, Joseph. If you interrupt the senator again, I’m going to have you thrown out on your ass!” Feedback from the microphone squealed and then tapered off in the deafening silence that followed.

  Ming and Bohai stopped just inside the door. Senator Fuquan stood with her shoulders thrown back. She was a full foot shorter than Senator Khan, but she stood her ground, the papers held firm at her side like the razor’s edge of a scythe she was about to use to cut Khan down to size.

  “Sir,” Khan said, walking past Fuquan to address the vice president directly in a lower voice. “This is a ploy to draw attention away from the real issue at hand.”

  “The lady is well within her rights. And, I should remind you, she has the floor.”

  “These are reports from last year! What about the riots? What about the army camping on our doorstep? We should be dealing with the problems of today!”

  “I will not ask you again, Senator Khan. Sit. Down.” The vice president squeezed the last two words through his perfect rows of white teeth.

  Khan’s fists balled at his sides. He turned and stalked back to his seat. When he returned to his seat, he sat next to his burly deputy, Harvey.

&n
bsp; As if nothing had happened, Fuquan continued in an even tone. “On November 15th, the shipment arrived half a kilo short. On January 2nd, no shipment arrived. That month, fifty people died of starvation in Fields. On February 1st…”

  Senator Fuquan stood tall and filibustered Senator Khan’s bill for the next twelve hours. She had all of Ming’s file to read from, so she didn’t have to make up material as she went. When she ran out of paper, she continued reading from a tablet, pausing occasionally to take small sips from a glass of water her grey-haired assistant passed off to her.

  Ming thought she would call on him to answer questions, that he would be brought to the senate floor for a deeper cross examination, but Bohai assured him that that would come later—if the charges were formalized. Only senators were allowed to speak on the senate floor, and a filibuster was a one-woman show, according to the rules.

  “Fuquan’s not letting go. Look how it’s affecting Khan. I’ve never seen him so worked up.”

  “The truth is a bitch,” Ming said.

  Ming checked the app on his phone several times while they watched Fuquan speak, and the meter began to measure some kind of output. Ming borrowed earbuds from someone sitting nearby, but with all the noise in here, he couldn’t tell whether it was recording properly or not. He began to worry that he wouldn’t be able to secure a confession in time. If Khan spent the evening in the senate, instead of in private, the bug would expire before he said anything useful.

  Fuquan began to flag around dinnertime. She stuttered a few words and then tripped over her own feet while she was pacing.

  An afternoon full of accusations had eroded faith in Khan’s plan. The votes that weren’t won by the doubt Fuquan had instilled in those gathered were swayed by the sentiment in her closing remarks.

  “If you cannot trust Senator Khan to manage grain silos in this nation’s capital with integrity, what makes him qualified to determine the city’s defenses—or the best path to end the hunger criss and return our city to safety? I’ll be the first to recognize his service to this country. His military career is commendable. But his worry for the soldiers he served alongside is clouding his judgment. People are not the real danger. Soldiers with hard weapons and soft boundaries are.”

  Khan didn’t miss a beat. Fuquan had barely taken a seat—signifying the end of her speech—when Khan was pushing for a vote on his martial law bill from that morning. They took the votes, and tallied them up. At 7pm, the vote was held. Khan’s bill was defeated by a slim margin. But it was defeated.

  At that point it no longer mattered if Khan had siphoned the rice into his root cellar with his own hands, or if he’d been the unwitting victim of bureaucratic oversight. He lost.

  As the assembly filed out of the senate chamber, Fuquan passed by Ming and flashed him a smile. He realized then that she could have spoken until midnight, but that she had stopped when she had said enough to secure the required votes.

  How she could have known Khan’s bill would fail to win the votes needed to pass was beyond him. He had more admiration for that woman with shifting green-purple hair than anyone he’d ever met. She worked magic this day.

  It wasn’t a victory, but it was a small win, and it heartened Ming. For the first time since Ari’s death, Ming thought that perhaps there was a chance the Republic could be saved after all.

  CHAPTER 27

  CONFESSION

  About twenty minutes after the senate cleared, Ming set out to finish what he started. Less than 8 hours left, and then his window of opportunity to drive the nail in the coffin of Khan’s political career would be gone.

  Thanks to Fuquan’s work, Khan’s bill was dead in the water. She had hurried out of the senate chamber before he could thank her, but he would find her and express his gratitude later. Right now, Ming had a small window that might, if luck prevailed, take Khan out of play permanently. If Senator Fuquan was able to secure food aid from the UN, perhaps these events would combine to end the hunger riots. Enshi could return to normal. No more protests. No more unnecessary deaths. No more tragedy. For the first time in his career, Ming truly had the end in his sights and the ability to make a difference.

  Even if he had to bend the rules a little bit.

  So he pretended to be distracted by his phone while he tracked Khan and his assistant through the halls at a distance, using the crowd as cover and being sure to keep well out of Khan’s line of sight. He followed them long enough to see the door of Khan’s office close. Then he hurried past Khan’s office to a quiet nook in an empty hallway.

  Ming put his phone to his ear. At first nothing but static and crashing thumps came through the speaker. Ming drew a mental picture of someone overturning a desk, or throwing books across the room, or knocking over a lamp. The noises came with trembling echo as if filtered through a shallow pool. That was the biobug at work. Human bodies were mostly water, so there was an unavoidable residual effect on the sound when you turned a human body into a microphone and used the electrical energy of a person to power the transmission.

  The racket stopped and silence stretched over a minute, then two. Ming began to worry he wouldn’t hear any words at all. Suddenly, the silence was broken with an expletive.

  “Damnit! How did Senator Fuquan get those reports?” The last word reverberated—reports, ports, orts.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You assured me it was taken care of.”

  “It was. Our people told me the backup servers in the Fields district office were destroyed in the riots last week.”

  A tingle raced up Ming’s spine. He’d copied the digital files from the Fields district office eight or nine days ago, during a desperate moment after the search for Ari’s body was finally called off. A few days later, a group of protestors forced open the government building where his district office was located and ransacked the place. At the time, he’d thought it had been a freak coincidence. His pessimism reached a new peak now. How wrong he’d been!

  “Well, someone else must have gotten to them first.”

  Ming imagined Harvey avoiding the gaze of Senator Khan’s intense eyes and pulling at his damp collar with two fingers.

  “Reach out to our friend in Fields,” Khan said. “He and I need to have a little talk.”

  Ming’s blood went cold. Who was his friend in Fields? Some corrupt local official? Did that mean—

  Wailing sirens sounded like a sullen whine deep in the Capitol building. Two of Captain Wallace’s officers sprinted down the hall past where Ming sat. Security guards ushered the politicians who lingered in the halls to the safety of their reinforced offices.

  Ming raced to the nearest exit—the west exit, where he and Fuquan had gone out just that morning. A horrible screeching, wrenching, twisting sound lead before a deep explosion. The building shook him to his knees. Captain Wallace and six officers near the door hit the ground, yelled for everyone else to get down.

  Ming stood up, and pushed through a massive wooden doors leading into the polished entryway.

  “Kai, no!” Captain Wallace yelled.

  Clods, slashes of loose dirt trailed across the torn and blasted lawn. The row of trees around the koi pond that had given Ming and Fuquan shade when they sat earlier than afternoon blazed like a candelabra in the night.

  Fear boiled in Ming’s gut. An image of the dead kid with his neck broken at a weird angle flashed across his vision. His throat clenched, his wrist ached. Ming fell to his knees.

  A mech spun in the middle of the torn lawn, the cockpit door swinging open as it turned. Its arms both spun wildly too, shooting bullets in every direction. There was a hissing sound as something near its chest caught fire.

  The first projectile tore a chunk out of the stairs, and the concussion threw Ming back toward the door. He landed on the hard stone, his injured wrist pinned painfully under his body.

  He managed to use his good hand to push himself to his feet, and step back into the door as another missile blasted a hole the size
of a melon out of a column of marble. The shard of stone splintered away and slashed across his head.

  CHAPTER 28

  LOST FOREVER

  Ming stumbled, dazed, through the door, blood pouring into his eyes. The skin on his forehead felt loose and it stung as he sprinted before Wallace and a dozen police officers who guided them through halls of the senate to the safety of a windowless bathroom.

  The bathroom was designed to be used as a bomb shelter, so Ming spent the next six hours locked in with a dozen congressional aides, a male cook, a female janitor, and a several people from IT who’d had the wits frightened out of them by the unexpected attack.

  Much conversation speculating on the nature of the attack circulated. They had all seen the mechs when Ming pushed open the door.

  “The rebels have agents in the army,” the cook whispered to a bored-looking aide.

  A guy from IT cleared his throat. “The mechs could have malfunctioned. They’re a complex piece of software melded with some vicious hardware.”

  “No way. Why would they attack the capital?” said the janitor. “It had to have been an inside job.”

  “Or a coup attempt.”

  All eyes turned to the janitor who had spoken.

  “Hey, I’m just saying,” she said. “Think about it.”

  Ming didn’t want to. He tried to stay out of the speculation, knowing that even here ears were listening. Besides, his mind was consumed with his mission. After staunching his head wound with paper towels, he spent the next two hours sick to his stomach with worry for his friends, turning his phone over and over in his hands.

  His fellow bunker-mates seemed to drift off in the quiet of the windowless room at the center of the building. When he could take the waiting no more, Ming closed himself into a stall and finally checked the recording. He passed the time by listening to it on low, close to his ear, over and over again.

  “Reach out to our friend in Fields. He and I need to have a little talk.”