With her gone, Ryan stretched in his chair and gazed around the large, bare room. From here, the only other room he could see into was a bathroom on the other side of the hall, because, aside from the office he had woken up in and now slept in, it was the only other room he was allowed into. The medical bay and the rest of the complex seemed to be behind large, locked doors that opened only to certain people. In the event of a raid the police had tools at their disposal that would make short work of the locks, but they looked tough enough that they’d give the NCLC time to get their people out of the building.
His captors weren’t being especially cruel to him, he’d realized as he watched their comings and goings. He had been granted access to the bathroom, was allowed to wash in the small shower cubicle, and was given food three times a day, although it had been made clear to him any of these privileges could be taken from him if he misbehaved. The biggest problem was boredom. The compound had almost two dozen people living in it that he knew of, with the accommodation area being located somewhere further down the long corridor towards the back. Almost everyone residing in the complex regarded him with nothing more than distant curiosity. It was now late morning, and the place felt empty, its inhabitants off carrying out whatever their duties were as part of the uprising. Hours of bored eavesdropping on the conversations between Matron and the others had told Ryan that they were mostly support staff to the active operatives within the NCLC, and so worked fairly long hours.
The children were all looked after by various members of the NCLC’s core team. Today, they had gone off with an older, worn-looking man called Maalik who spent most days working at some other base. The kids seemed to like him, because he taught them how to fire guns and how to fight hand-to-hand. It all reminded Ryan of ancient photographs he’d seen in history books of old-world children, who were given drugs and made to fight and die for causes they couldn’t possibly have understood. He thought of hungry-looking kids in over-large sportswear posing with assault rifles, or white-skinned fourteen-year-olds in trenches, the promises of adventure and glory no longer keeping them warm.
He couldn’t know for certain, but his imagining of what Maalik might be preparing the children for was one of the many things that reminded Ryan that the NCLC, however reasonable they seemed, were terrorists.
A metallic clank resonated through the steel door that led to the main complex. It opened and a large man in a wheelchair that could barely contain his muscular frame pushed through. He glared at Ryan as he said, ‘Where’s the nurse?’
Ryan pointed to the medical bay. The man wheeled himself over to the door, raised a fist, and pounded on it. ‘Ava! Where the hell are you? My patch needs changing!’
The medical bay door opened and Matron – Ava – stood there, staring down at the man in the wheelchair. ‘Go wait, Yosef. I’ve got prep to do, and your patch still has hours of meds in it.’
‘You’re going to leave me out there with the prisoner?’ Yosef said incredulously. ‘I get shot furthering the cause and you’re going to leave me to rot in the company of this filth?’
‘Yeah, I am, and you’re going to wait there, with the prisoner, until I’m done here,’ Ava said testily. ‘Then I’m going to bring you in here and I’m going to use my years of medical experience to magically fix your broken, battered body. Wait, and be fuckin’ grateful.’
And with that, she closed the door, leaving a fuming Yosef to his own devices. He turned in his wheelchair and his eyes met Ryan’s.
‘It’s nice to see you in a more collected state, Councillor,’ he said in a mock-civil voice. ‘Your family ravages our people, I get shot in the line of duty, and you’re the one in better nick? If I were in charge I’d have you chained up in some windowless cell sitting in a pile of your own excrement. That’d teach you.’
Ryan didn’t ask exactly what it would teach him.
‘But I’ll tell you the worst, the fucking gall of you people,’ Yosef spat. ‘You try and sabotage your competition over at the Five Prongs, and you blame it on us. Like we’d have the fucking ineptitude to yank a few cords out of some servers and scarper.’
The colour rose in Ryan’s face. Quietly, he said, ‘Are you quite finished?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’m fucking finished, you arrogant, pampered little squirt of shit. It’s people like you, who think you run the fucking world and that the rest of us are ants, who are killing the poor folk of this city. You and your quarantines and your shutting down the shuttle station and your—’
Steel locks whirred, and the main door into the room opened. The old man Maalik came in, with a gang of children trailing close behind him. ‘Is something wrong here, lads?’ he said, in a jovial voice.
‘No, Maalik, the councillor and I were just discussing some social issues,’ Yosef growled. Maalik laughed.
The medical bay door swung aside, and Ava came out. She smiled at Maalik, then at the kids. ‘Did you guys have fun with Mr Maalik?’
The children nodded and replied almost in unison, ‘Yeeeeesssss.’
Vik, the child Ryan recognized from before, piped up near the back, ‘He took us to the range and I hit in the red zone.’
The smile faded from Ava’s face for a moment, then returned. ‘Oh, really? Well done you! I bet pretty soon, if Mr Maalik keeps taking you guys shooting, you’ll get them all inside the red zone!’
The smile was strained. Ryan wondered if she felt as uneasy as he did over the question of why the children were being taught to shoot. She said nothing more, but turned and took Yosef inside the medical bay to re-dress his gunshot wound, and most of the children followed Maalik back down the main corridor to the rest of the complex. Only Vik remained behind.
‘Hey, Ryan,’ he said, coming closer.
‘Hey, Vik. They took you shooting today, did they?’
‘Yeah!’ Vik exclaimed. ‘Maalik showed us how to use a handgun.’
‘Oh? Were you any good?’
Vik looked dejected. ‘I got my first shot inside the red zone but I missed most of the others. I must have just been lucky with the good shot.’
‘Aw, that sucks,’ said Ryan. ‘But you know, that’s not always a bad thing. When they’re shooting at other people, most people instinctively aim wide anyway. They don’t want to shoot someone. So it’s not such a bad thing you missed the target.’
‘I’m not shooting someone though,’ Vik replied, ‘I’m just trying to hit a target. It’s just a goal. I’m aiming for it, but I can’t hit it.’
Ryan stopped for a second, and conceded that Vik had a point. ‘Fair enough. So when’s the next shooting session?’
‘A few days from now …’ Vik looked up at the large monitor, suddenly noticing the frenetic newscast. ‘What happened? Did we do something?’
‘Someone broke into the Five Prongs and messed with their computer systems. Ava doesn’t seem to think that it was any of you guys.’
Vik nodded, and the door from the main complex opened once again. Kanak walked through. As she spotted her son, she broke into a smile.
‘There you are!’
‘Look, Mum,’ he said, pointing towards the monitor. ‘Someone broke the computers at the Five Prongs. Was that one of us? Was that Dad?’
Kanak froze for a second.
Then the smile bloomed again. ‘No, sweetie, I told you. Daddy’s undercover with the secret unit,’ she said.
Though obviously not so secret that she can’t bring it up in front of a hostage whose father signs the Security Force’s pay-cheques.
Vik grinned with pride at this. Kanak took his hand and led him from the room, back towards the main complex. Ryan watched them go, wondering what had happened to the boy’s father.
It had become hard for Ryan to begrudge most of the NCLC members their hiding place from the Security Force; they were either terrified children or parents trying to keep their families safe. This was, after all, a safe house and by its very nature was defensive. But this father … he was an NCLC man and,
judging from Kanak’s response, he was almost certainly under arrest or dead. Perhaps the ‘secret undercover mission’ explanation was the NCLC equivalent of telling a child their dog had gone to live on a farm out of town. Maybe he’d been shot, as Yosef had been the night Ryan had awoken to find himself captive. Maybe he was rotting in a prison cell in the Security Force building. And maybe whatever it was had happened to Vik’s father and his colleagues while they were hurting or killing someone else. The more he thought about it, the more Ryan was becoming certain that something had happened to the man to tear him away from his family, and it wasn’t likely that he was simply hunkering down in a safe house.
And some small part of Ryan’s psyche over which he had no control thought:
Good.
He sat there, horrified at himself for being glad that little Vik, who didn’t even understand what his father was doing, might grow up without a father. Yet on further examination, he found that gut reaction less appalling. The NCLC killed or maimed people, and not always defensively. They started riots that killed innocents. The entire point of a governed state with a monopoly on legitimate use of force was to protect the general populace from people like that. Was it wrong that they fell victim to the mechanisms put in place by the Council to maintain that protection?
Not to mention, they kidnapped me.
The justifying arguments were now pushing to the forefront.
These people are using violence and destruction to force their political desires upon the society around them. Of course that society is going to fight back. If their assertion of their agenda is violent, the rejection of that agenda has to match that violence right back. Order needs to be restored.
Even as he thought it, Ryan knew this was nonsense. Aside from the fact that in this situation civility and survival went hand in hand, he consciously did not want that sort of mindset. These were people, and the ideal scenario was that nobody would get hurt. In a more abstract sense, he even recognized that the first act of injustice was the quarantine and curfew imposed on the high-infection areas. The NCLC’s aggressive approach was a response to the violent ways in which those policies were often enforced – an escalation, but within a cycle of violence which didn’t start with them.
He understood this, on an intellectual level.
But it seemed like so long since he had last seen his children or kissed his wife, and it was these people who were stopping him. Resentment ground in the pit of his gut.
Vik poked his head around the door again, interrupting Ryan’s soul-searching. He was carrying a plate of sandwiches. ‘Hey, Ryan, I’ve got your lunch.’
For a moment so brief that he could almost pretend it never happened, as Vik walked through the door, Ryan saw only Vik’s father, a terrorist, probably a killer, and wanted, on a cruel, animal level, to knock the sandwiches from that terrorist’s son’s hands, to hurt him, just out of spite.
Ryan was disgusted with himself. He thanked the boy, took the plate, and felt a great unburdening when Vik turned and left him alone. As he ate, he thought about his family, and tried to bury the dark, visceral urges as deep down as he could.
Chapter 9
ALICE AMIRMOEZ SWIVELLED round in her chair to face her examiners. Behind her, the command terminal she’d run a mission at three days ago flashed ‘Simulation objective complete’ up onto its monitor. Kahleed Banks and Tal Surdar looked impressed, Tal even nodding to himself slightly. Following the success of the mission she’d stepped in to coordinate, they’d spent hours trying to persuade her to participate in a rebellion she’d made clear she hated. Eventually, attrition had won and they had talked her into demonstrating her skills on one of their training simulations.
‘Very good, Alice,’ said Kahleed. ‘I’d have thought you’d be rustier than this. It’s been how long since you left the police?’
‘I quit being a coordinator two years ago. Before that, I was a field agent. But yeah, I did this for a long, long time.’
‘From what I could see,’ said Tal, ‘the only mistakes you made were the result of either your having to get used to the system, or the constraints of the program. By the end you’d even adjusted to that. I mean, I’m pretty sure that in real life that shopfront thing would have worked.’
Kahleed straightened up. ‘Of course, this does rather skip around the question. You’re going to be here, waiting for us to get all the pieces in order to smuggle you and the children out of the city. It seems like a waste to not use talents of your calibre. Can we at least discuss you coordinating our missions for us while you’re here?’
Alice sat back in her chair and asked herself the same question. She didn’t care about the NCLC in any real sense. She hadn’t been able to sleep the last two nights and she was beginning to feel the effects. She’d hated the fact that she had been the subject of conversations she herself was not privy to. Mostly she hated that she was being drawn into someone else’s battle.
She thought of her children. Ria had spent the last few days being more bored than she had ever been in her life. Alice’s time being taken up by simulated operations meant that Ria only had Zeno for company. There was no one for her to play or socialize with. After all, this was meant to be a temporary, transitional shelter. The other children being sheltered by the NCLC were at larger bases with their parents, and Ria’s friends’ parents couldn’t be trusted not to turn Alice in. And then, of course, she had yet to tell Ria what had happened to her father.
Still awaiting a response, Kahleed continued, trying to fill the silence ‘… and of course, we understand that your first responsibility is to your children—’
Alice looked up at him, eyes cold and piercing. ‘I don’t need to be reminded of my responsibility to my children.’
Kahleed’s eyes widened. Tal stepped in, hands raised. ‘We never meant to imply that you did—’
‘Look,’ she continued, leaning forward and cutting him off, ‘you seem like you’ve got a well-meaning cause going here. I’ve known you two for years. You’re good people. But you got my husband killed not five days ago. I could have been arrested. My children could have been taken from me. This organization threw my life into chaos.’ She paused. ‘I’m grateful that you’re helping my family escape this place, but I never agreed with Jacob about this. I stepped in the other day because Suman Chaudhri was in no state to be leading an operation. He was liable to get people hurt. But right now I don’t want to be the one ordering the deaths of people I don’t have a problem with.’
She sat back in her chair, her arms crossed and her face stony. ‘That’s what you’re up against. Now sell me on your rebellion.’
Kahleed nodded. ‘Jacob always mentioned your distaste for his “game of cops-and-robbers”. Now, of course I can’t speak for him, but I can explain why I’m doing this.’
He wheeled over one of the operators’ chairs and sat facing Alice, looking her in the eye.
‘I grew up maybe three blocks from here. Gang territory. Most of the rows of houses I lived in were labs for making Poly or Flush. Not much actual violence – we were too deep in one gang’s territory for corner disputes – but the threat, the fear hung in the air like smog. Naj-Pur was conceived as a manufacturing district, a source of good jobs that people could rely upon, and for about a decade after New Cairo’s completion it did just that. Enough for a community to grow up on the promise that the work would always be there. Then, work moved elsewhere. Parents left to follow the jobs, and all the kids who didn’t have the brains, money, luck or work ethic to move into middle-class careers watched on hopelessly as the industries failed. It cost less just to ship in materials that had been manufactured in Khartoum and Addis Ababa, so that’s what everyone went for. This entire district of the city was betrayed by the breaking of the promise it was founded on. The only industry that didn’t leave was the drugs. There was always money in sitting on a corner. You could buy decent clothes, better gadgets. Kids were raised thinking that was what people like us were meant to asp
ire to; it was the only place where we saw people like us doing well for themselves.’
Kahleed’s eyes were unfocused, as if he was staring at something in the distance. Tal looked down at him, brow furrowed – he was a middle-class Falkur kid, like Alice. She wondered if he’d ever heard this story before.
‘Thanks to dumb luck, I got out,’ Kahleed continued. ‘I worked myself half to death, studied business at university and got a grant to start my own company, manufacturing terminals. I got a contract to create custom terminals for the Council and all of a sudden our bank statements were in the black. But more than that, the government tie gave us the power and connections to change things. So I kept working with Jacob, the other Naj-Pur boy who’d done good. We got a petition of almost five hundred thousand signatures stating that the signatories would buy products made in New Cairo to the exclusion of any competitors. Manufacturing savings don’t mean anything if no one’s buying your product. We built up the oversight infrastructure, and we went to the corporate headquarters of the four big companies. The head of NDLT refused to even get on a video call with us. Banach-Tarski had a bug in their message system and sent us the same rejection twice. That was a blow to the ego. FanaSoCo said, with all the earnestness in the world, that they would come on board if they had the money to fund the redevelopment of the factories, but they trailed the other three companies too much to risk it.’
Kahleed chuckled to himself. Behind him, a terminal monitor was showing a newscast discussing Councillor Ryan Granier’s kidnapping and the subsequent legislative delay.
‘It was GeniSec who took us up on it in the end. Tau Granier heard us out and shook our hands. Within six months they’d re-outfitted a third of the old foreclosed factories and employed tens of thousands. A month after that, they were running at seven million dollars of additional production expenses against fifty million dollars of additional profit. The people of Naj-Pur were buying their New Cairo-made products. The people of Surja were buying. Hell, the people of Alexandria, the city centre and Falkur were all buying, figuring that a regeneration of their city could only benefit them. GeniSec went from third place to the biggest corporate body in the United African Democracies, and stayed there.
The Hive Construct Page 10