Come the Revolution

by Frank Chadwick

  Outside the sky was beginning to turn from black to gray. I started toward the clinic but Moshe steered me to the soup kitchen, ignoring my protests.

  “It’ll just be a second. I put in an order on my way to wake you up.” One of the cooks was waiting at the door, pushed a plastic cup of hot tea into my left hand and gave a greasy paper bag to Moshe. “Rice balls,” he explained as we headed to the clinic.

  The tea was sweet. I normally take it without sugar but I probably needed the extra boost.

  “Open up,” he said and popped a small rice ball into my mouth. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I bit down on it. I tasted some fish oil in the center, maybe on a little tofu, and a delicious piece of pickle.

  “Damn, that’s good!”

  “Ought to be,” he said. “Dolores Wu found out the sous-chef from Pinnacle came in with his daughter, looking for a place to hide. Now he’s the head line cook for the soup kitchen.”

  “Pinnacle? That Human restaurant over in Arc-Jannu?”

  “Yeah. Wait till you taste his faux crab bisque. We could rename the soup kitchen the bisque kitchen, maybe attract a classier clientele. What do you think? Open up again.”

  He popped another rice ball in my mouth. “Here’s another joke I remembered. Two atoms walking down the street. First atom says, ‘Hey! I lost an electron!’ Second atom says, ‘Are you sure?’ First one says, ‘I’m positive!’” He laughed.

  “I’m positive, get it?”

  “No,” I said, still chewing the rice ball.

  “Oh, Boss! I mean, that’s actually kinda sad.”

  Maybe so, but two rice balls later I felt like a new man. We were just about to the clinic and central ammo resupply point but I still hadn’t heard any small arms fire or seen much frantic activity.

  “Where was the attack?” I asked.

  “Oh, it hasn’t started yet. Dezi’s put together a striker squad she’s going to use to surprise one of their observation posts, maybe pick up some extra hardware.”

  “Dezi?” I said.

  He looked at me. “It’s her name, ain’t it? Look, you want another rice ball or you want to play wisenheimer?”

  Zdravkova waited in front of the clinic with a dozen others, about half of which had RAGs, so it must have been a picked unit. She nodded curtly to me and smiled at Moshe.

  “Good, you’re finally here,” she said to me, and stuffed a paper into my jacket pocket. “That is my new squad list with weapons and their main assignment areas, so you can rework the ammo resupply points. I tried to keep similar magazine types in the same area.”

  “Thanks. That’ll help. Got a party planned?”

  “Yes, and we must go before it grows too light. We will be back in an hour if we come back at all.”

  She waved her squad up and they moved off to the west.

  “Treat ’em rough, Killer,” I called after her, and then Moshe and I watched them disappear into the shadows. I felt a rain drop, another, and then it began raining softly.

  “No solar today,” Moshe said, and he sighed. “I gotta scout the east side, see if I can come up with any more LENR generators. Found about fifty liters of deuterium while you were sleeping so I changed out the fuel in our lowest performing plants, but still…”

  He squinted up at the now-black sky, the earlier traces of dawn having vanished. “Man, could we use some sunshine.”

  I felt exactly the same way. I wondered what Marr was doing.

  In the distance I heard small arms fire, single shots at first and then the stutter of a RAG on full auto.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Over the next day, Zdravkova led out four different “striker squads” to raid the Varoki observation posts around us. Near as we could tell, the mob had been working itself up to march on Sookagrad before that, but those quick, sharp blows put them back on their heels, made them rethink everything, wait for a while, see what we planned to do next. So the raids bought us at least another day of comparative security, and a fair haul of abandoned weapons, at the cost of two people wounded and no dead.

  Humans had a reputation for aggression and violence that was overstated, but for a change was useful. Zdravkova’s raids reinforced that reputation, made the Varoki over there start thinking maybe every Human really was as good as two Varoki, or three, or ten. We didn’t know what the odds really were, but they were long and probably getting longer every day. Anything that kept the Varoki mentally on the defensive was money in the bank.

  It also gave us time to start making reports to the outside world. Our vid tech with the camera had done some promotional work before the troubles—as we were all starting to think of them—and he did interviews with Katranjiev and Stal. Zdravkova begged off and everyone, including me, agreed it would be a terrible idea to let the world in general know that the infamous Sasha Naradnyo was hanging out here. I watched the two interviews and didn’t think much of them. Too much like heroic speeches from our fearless leaders. Then it hit me.

  “You know, we actually have a semi-famous journalist here,” I told Stal. I approached him because he wasn’t that anxious to have his face plastered all over, besides which Katranjiev was still likely to call the sky red if I said it was blue.

  “You mean long-lost sister? Did not think like each other.”

  “I haven’t seen her since the day she got here, but so what? She’s got a following and seems to know her stuff. You ought to get her in on this. Ask Zdravkova, too. Dezi doesn’t want her face shown, but being a revolutionary and all she’s got to know more about agitprop than some guy who did promotional holovids for Varoki sex aids.”

  “Leatherheads need love too,” he said, but then he nodded in agreement.

  So my estranged sister Aurora became the voice of Sookagrad. She ditched the big-shot speeches and that afternoon started doing interviews with ordinary people, finding out their backgrounds, what they’d seen in the last few days. I watched them: good stuff. There wasn’t anything weepy about them, if you know what I mean. Just people telling what happened, how they got here, and what they were doing now.

  The interviews had a lot of motion, following folks as they worked in the soup kitchen (our former sous-chef), swept out a new building for our dormitory expansion, helped mount an LENR generator to power a drug synthesizer. They were all upbeat, smiling at the end as they worked, even if they had a choked-up moment or two when telling their story. Put some of the horrible, frightening things they’d seen together with that energy and optimism at the end and you had a hell of a message without ever having to spell it out or draw pictures.

  She didn’t mention any of the fighting yet, or what we were doing to defend the district. That would come later, but in the meantime it was nice to give the citizens of the Cottohazz a view of Humans doing a whole bunch of different things, none of them violent or illegal. It was a side of Humanity a lot of them had probably never seen.

  Katranjiev didn’t much like it, whether because his interview had been cut or because Aurora was my sister I couldn’t tell.

  “You have to show suffering,” he said when they held a troika meeting the next morning. I guess I was included because the whole communiqué thing had been my idea originally. “Who’s going to come to our rescue if it looks as if we’re all happy and healthy here?”

  Aurora didn’t jump right in to defend her piece. Zdravkova argued with Katranjiev a bit and then asked Aurora what she thought. Waiting to be asked was smart.

  “People don’t sympathize very much with pure victims, and the Cottohazz is tired of Humans complaining about how bad they have it. If we show them Humans taking care of themselves, building a peaceful community in all this chaos, we’ll get their attention and grudging respect. And it’s better to underplay everything. It must smack of reality, not invented drama, you understand?”

  “But there is suffering here, much suffering,” Katranjiev countered.

  “If what we all think is going to happen comes true,” Aurora said, “we
will have ample opportunity to show that later. But if you begin with suffering now, then later it’s just more of the same, like a broken record, and the audience will tune it out. We show them order, community, work, and hope first. What comes later will be more powerful because of the contrast, and it will enrage our audience.”

  Listening to her sort of gave me a chill. She was talking about a possible nightmare scenario as if it were a video play or an ad campaign instead of something which might engulf all of us. That’s how a professional had to think, I guess. A doctor facing vans full of casualties from a major fire thought triage and treatment, not what all those injuries and deaths meant to all those families. A squad leader outlining a mission and identifying where they were likely to take casualties couldn’t let himself dwell on how well or how long he’d known the men who were about to get killed or maimed.

  Still, hearing it laid out so emotionlessly sent a shiver up my back, but it won the argument.

  So the first report went out. It began with a camera shot of Aurora, the soup kitchen in the background with a line of giggling kids going in to get lunch. Her first line was, “This is Sookagrad, calling all the people of the Cottohazz. This is Sookagrad calling.”

  We could send on the fiber cable, but we couldn’t receive because we couldn’t decode any of the flow in the data pipe, and of course anything broadcast was being jammed, so we had no way of knowing who, if anyone, was actually paying attention, or what anyone thought of it. All we could do was send it out and hope for the best.

  I stopped her outside the headquarters building after the meeting, told her that, whatever else there was between us, I thought the vid report was top-notch, exactly what we needed. She looked down while I said it and then looked away while she answered me.

  “Thank you. I know it must have cost you a great deal to say that.”

  Actually it didn’t cost me a thing, or at least anything important. If she’d known me at all she’d have known that, but what was the point in saying so?

  “Look, we’re strapped for fabricator time,” I said, “but I’m going to try to fit in a special job, some props for one of your upcoming reports.”

  “Props?” she said. “I don’t know. I like to keep it as authentic as possible. What kind of props?”

  “Munie badges. I can’t afford the time to run them off for everyone hauling a gun, but I can do a couple dozen and you make sure any fighter on camera has one.”

  “Badges? Isn’t that illegal?”

  It suddenly occurred to me that, in all the confusion, not everyone knew about the deal we’d cut with the Munies.

  “Illegal? Oh, boy, you’ve got a little catching up to do, but you’re really going to like what I tell you next. It fits your narrative beautifully.”

  * * *

  Two hours later I stood in the cramped workshop Petar Ivanov, our head fabricator, used as his base of operations. The sound of humming fabricators and the smells of hot metal, blending chemicals, and unwashed body odor filled the air in the dimly lit room. Moshe took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled through his nose.

  “Schrödinger’s walking down the street with a shoebox under his arm. A Munie stops him, looks inside the box, and says, ‘Hey, there’s a dead cat in here.’ Schrödinger says, ‘Well there is now!’”

  He and Ivanov laughed. Billy Conklin, the remaining member of our quartet, made a sour expression and took a drink of his tea. I just looked at them.

  “This guy Schroder didn’t know he had a dead cat?”

  “Is Schrödinger,” Ivanov said, “and actually, cat not unambiguously dead until Munie look.”

  I just shook my head. “Don’t physicists ever just tell dirty jokes?”

  “Oh, sure,” Moshe said. “Here’s one: why are physicists lousy lovers?”

  “I don’t know, why?”

  “’Cause when they know the right position they can’t get the speed right, and when they know the right speed, they can’t get the position right.”

  “I don’t get it. Wait…does it have something to do with that guy-on-the-highway joke, about speed and knowing where he is?”

  “Amazing! Yes, it actually does.”

  “Well, I still don’t get it.”

  “No,” he said, “but you might not be a total shmendrick, much to my surprise.”

  “Is there some reason I’m here, other than to be insulted?”

  “Yeah,” Conklin said, “me too. I got some pretty full saddlebags, you know.”

  Moshe grinned. “Not to worry, you’re both gonna love this, especially you, Billy.” He held his hand out to Ivanov, who carefully passed him a small opaque plastic box from the workbench.

  “There better not be a dead cat in there,” I said.

  He opened the lid and showed us. “Don’t touch.”

  A dozen metallic cylinders, about a centimeter in diameter and ten centimeters long, rested on a bed of extruded soft foam with channels cut to hold them and keep them from rolling. They were dull grey but with a red stripe painted around the middle. One end was closed, the other partially open.

  “Okay, I give up.”

  “Blastin’ caps,” Billy Conklin said. “Right?”

  “Mr. Greenwald say need blasting caps,” Ivanov said, “so I make.”

  I looked at Moshe. “And we need blasting caps why?”

  “Because I found an industrial storage unit where somebody stashed a bunch of bulk maintenance consumables, including about five hundred liters of a cleaning solvent: CH3NO2,” he said and then looked directly at me. “That’s nitromethane to the scientifically illiterate.”

  “Gawd damn!” Conklin said and nearly dropped his tea.

  Given my previous line of work, I knew enough about causing trouble to know where this was going and I started smiling. “What you gonna cut it with? EDA?”

  Ivanov shrugged, “Other amines work, but yes, ethylenediamine—EDA—is most common.”

  “Five hundred liters of PLX binary explosive,” I said.

  “Five twenty-five by the time we add the EDA and mix it,” Moshe said, his grin even wider.

  I thought that over for a few seconds, and for a change my thoughts were not restricted solely to ways of causing mayhem.

  “Billy, you got any people who can use explosives without blowing themselves up?”

  “Yup, me for one. Also know a guy, Dhaliwa, been around construction blasting for years, knows his shit. I can probably rustle up a couple more. What you got in mind?”

  “We need shelters, as in underground shelters, and we need a lot of them. All these lean-tos and tents—if they start lobbing even mortars in here, it’ll cause havoc. We don’t have the time or equipment to dig shelters, but what about explosive excavation?”

  Conklin scratched his bald spot and nodded. “Sure. I mean, getting cover over the holes is going to be a bitch once we blow them, but even open holes are better than nothing.”

  “We can maybe do better than that,” Moshe said. “The storm sewers run straight to the Wanu River, and they aren’t buried very deep. There are some drains from the surface to the storm system, but none here in Sookagrad.”

  “Gimme a couple kilos of that PLX,” Billy Conklin said, “I’ll make a connection.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but with all this rain, won’t the storm sewers be full of water?”

  Moshe and Conklin both got a little more serious.

  “Oy, maybe so,” Moshe said. “We’ll just have to look, right?”

  Storm sewers were usually pretty big, so they wouldn’t back up in a heavy rain, but if they were even half full of fast-flowing water, it would be somewhere between tough and impossible to use them for shelter. Maybe we were back to explosive excavation, but Billy was right: how were we going to put hard cover over all those holes?

  This logistics stuff wasn’t as easy as it looked. You knew you had a real problem on your hands if a half ton of binary explosive couldn’t fix it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five
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  The days were starting to run together so I sat down and worked out how long I’d been here. This was the afternoon of Sixteen-Day, Eight-Month Waning, the fourth day—fourth day since I’d arrived and also the fourth day since the military coup.

  I found Zdravkova in the headquarters building, looking grim. She almost always looked grim so I didn’t attach much significance to it.

  “Hey, Killer, remember how you told me your secret dream was to blow a bunch of stuff up? I got some good news.”

  She didn’t just look grim, she looked worn down and filthy. I knew she’d gone out with three of the raids on the previous day and had been making the rounds of the perimeter posts since then—at least when she wasn’t helping with the training/orientation program she’d whipped up. Try putting an army together in less than a week sometime, see how much sleep you get.

  I half expected her to snarl at me, but she just looked up, emotion overwhelmed by fatigue. “I could use some good news,” she said, and she nodded toward the back of the office. I saw two Varoki talking to Katranjiev, haranguing him more like. He didn’t look happy.

  “What do they want?”

  “I caught the start of it. They’re representatives of the Provisional Government. Seems the gangs around us have been incorporated into a Citizens’ Emergency Militia. The government’s gotten complaints about unprovoked attacks against them.”

  “Your raids?” I said. “They must have an interesting understanding of ‘unprovoked.’”

  “Not that interesting. So pending a complete investigation, they demand we turn over all firearms and that anyone involved in the fighting surrender themselves to custody of the militia.”

  “Or else,” I added. “Is there a time limit on the ultimatum?”

  “Twelve hours.”

  “That means time runs out about dawn.” I thought about that for a moment. “You know, if I were a bunch of unscrupulous Human-hating Varoki pricks, I’d think we Humans figured we had twelve hours to get ready, maybe get a last good night’s sleep before sunup. I’d think real hard about jumping the gun and launching a predawn attack, catch us napping, maybe finish us off in one big push.”