The Debt Collectors War

by Tess Mackenzie

  In the United States, the transition had triggered a crisis. Or rather, it had precipitated a crisis which had been looming for a generation. The economic cost of overly-expensive legacy energy sources had combined with assumptions about limitless credit, and social dysfunction, and a hesitant attempt at empire, and expectations about how comfortable life ought to be for everyone in what had still been seen as the most important nation in the world, and together those things had created a crisis from which the United States had never recovered.

  The United States had run out of money, and had no way to pay its debts, so those debts had been sold to banks and foreign nations, and eventually, years later, to companies such as Ellie’s.

  Not long afterwards the debt-recovery operations had begun.

  Debt-recovery was a vast, disorganized, semi-military operation, ostensibly begun to recover the capital cost of the unpaid loans, plus service fees such as interest, but mostly now just a business enterprise which existed for the sake of its own existence. It had been going on for decades, and showed no signs of ending soon. There had been a lot of wealth in America once, and also a vast amount of debt, and so there was a great deal to recover, and no real reason to hurry about doing it.

  Now, debt-recovery had taken on a life of its own. Like all large business enterprises did sooner or later, Ellie supposed. The American debt-recovery, the Měi-guó debt-recovery, had ballooned into a web of interlinked businesses, all providing cost-added services to one another, a kind of self-perpetuating system of patronage and contracts and pocket-lining and greed rather than anything to do with the most efficient way to recover outstanding credit. The debt-recovery companies charged exorbitant fees for their services, adding on those costs to the capital debt they were recovering. Costs such as shipping and security and consultant analysts to advise on best-value removal strategies, until it seemed as though there was almost a cycle of services fees where entire subcontracting companies existed to do nothing but provide a service to another company, and then charge a fee.

  Companies existed to resell recovered equipment, or recover the component metals in scrap, or advise on predicted market fluctuations which could alter the expected returns on recovered goods. Old rubbish tips were mined. Old industrial plants were too. That mining incurred expenses. There were refineries which did nothing but recover rare earths from scrapped electronics, or oils from dumped plastic. There were engineering firms which did nothing but remove factories and bridges and old railway lines for scrap, and all of these consultants added their fees to the existing debt, and none of their fees were regulated or controlled, since the creditor banks didn’t care, and most of the time the subcontractors were owned by the creditor banks anyway, because they had decided they might as well retain the profits of their debt-recovery business.

  The debt-recovery operations had turned into a multi-generational, continent-wide plunder, but Ellie didn’t especially care. It wasn’t her home, it wasn’t her people, and it had been going on for so long that no-one really seemed to notice any more. The debt-recovery operations were deeply entrenched in corporate balance sheets and geopolitical stability now. So deeply entrenched, and with such a potential negative impact on profitability if they ended, that it just seemed obvious to her that debt-recovery was never going away.

  To her, it was mostly just a very gentle kind of war, a military occupation no different to the police actions in Afghanistan and Iran. There were said to be more security forces on the ground in the former United States than were involved in all other peace operations elsewhere in the world combined. Ellie believed it. There was a lot of work in Měi-guó. Between security for the actual collections, the personnel with spanners removing scrap metal and machinery, and security for the audit and investigation teams checking everything valuable had been taken, and security for the shipping and logistical supply convoys, there were a lot of people on the ground, and a lot of security needed. There was good steady work in Měi-guó America, Ellie had heard, but all the same, she had always avoided working there. In part, she didn’t know the culture, and had always felt better in the MidEast. And Měi-guó security was unskilled work, less precise and therefore badly paid, better suited to emerging-economy mercenaries without any actual training than members of an elite hunt-and-snatch team like hers. Debt-recovery operational security wasn’t difficult, like hunting insurgents was difficult. Debt-recovery security mostly meant standing at checkpoints, controlling movement in and out of declared debtor zones, and sometimes guarding debtor work-gangs, although that was usually done by trustee debtors. Měi-guó debt-recovery security mostly meant standing around, waiting for something bad to happen, and Měi-guó America was still a fairly dangerous place to be.

  All her life, even as a kid in Sydney, Ellie had been hearing what a hazardous place Měi-guó was. There was crime and debt and poverty and almost unending near-civil war. It had got so bad, and been bad for so long, that everyday life was more like it was in Afghanistan than anywhere in the modern world. Life was dangerous. It needed care. Even ordinary people lived in fortified homes and drove fortified trucks to fortified shops to buy their goods. And everywhere they went, they went armed. Those who worked mostly worked at home, web-commuting to jobs in other parts of the world.

  Crime and civil unrest had always been America’s problems, and now they were infinitely worse. The old American government had lost its cities to crime gangs generations ago and had never taken them back, and then, with the debt-recovery settlement, they had lost the farms and suburbs, too. The countryside was at war with the debt-recovery corporates, and with what was left of the American government, as well.

  The problem was guns. Like in the MidEast, people in Měi-guó had always been well-armed, and so had the capability to cause trouble when they wished, and just like the MidEast, they wished to quite often. Insurgencies began quickly, as soon as a few people were irritated with their rulers. They began, and spread, and caused no end of trouble. There had been insurgencies in America for thirty years now, on and off, flaring up and dying down in different places and different times, for reasons from anti-debt activism, to old-style political separatists separating from something that was already broken, to hajjis who still thought they were fighting the last great war between believers and the rest, and hadn’t realized the Chinese banks had already won.

  The Americans had kept their guns as part of the debt-recovery settlement, because even then it had been obvious the trouble of taking them away would be too great. Guns were a near-religious issue to them. Self-respect and pride came from a gun, just like in the MidEast. And as well, Ellie supposed, it probably hadn’t been worth the trouble of disarming America, because even then body armor had been good enough that being shot was mostly just irritation.

  The guns were a nuisance, though, for debt-recovery operations, because they added to the overall tension. They led to more pointless shootings, and more civilian deaths, just like in Afghanistan, because the guns meant every operation was a live one, which wore on the collection agents’ nerves, and made them tense and irritable and more likely to shoot.

  America had changed, Ellie supposed, but it hadn’t changed so much. Not enough that everyone who’d seen any old film couldn’t recognize large parts of it. Americans still had their cultural weapons, and still ate their cultural food, and they were still allowed to keep their cultural customs like politics and free speech, as long as nothing changed and no-one was actually listening. Just like the MidEast, Ellie supposed, they could talk until they starved because it was an outlet for their frustration. Or not, on occasion, when their guns and speeches combined to get them so worked up they caused trouble.

  It was all a mess, Ellie thought. Měi-guó was a terrible mess, and it was a different kind of mess to what Ellie was used to. It was all workhouses and industrial deconstruction and strip-malls full of plastic clothes and plastic food. The food was awful, Ellie had heard, but she didn’t plan to eat anything local so she didn�
��t especially care.

  She would need to pay attention, to learn as she went. She would be unfamiliar with the environment and tactical situation, and might be oblivious to danger around her. And worse, because of where the heir had last been seen, she was going into the middle of Měi-guó, the heartland, the most traditionally American part of all, away from the relative safety and normality of the debt-recovery bases in the ports along the coasts.

  It was Afghanistan all over again.

  Chapter 4

  Ellie and Sameh flew into Vancouver. It was only four hours from Sydney on the trans-Pacific shuttle. They had flown, and Sameh hadn’t been too concerned, because, she said, they would only crash into the ocean if something went wrong with the plane.

  They flew to Vancouver because it was the usual Pacific-side entry point for debt-recovery teams travelling into Měi-guó. Tijuana was a little too suburban and dull to be entirely happy about large numbers of military personnel wandering around its airport, and they couldn’t fly straight to the middle of Měi-guó. No-one did any more. No-one who didn’t absolutely have to was reckless enough to fly through American airspace, not with its aging air-traffic control infrastructure and human operators and the jumble of terrorist groups haphazardly taking shots at passing airliners. Over the years, Vancouver had become the most common entry point because it was closer to visiting creditors from China and India, and so a large number of debt-recovery and asset-storage subcontractors now based themselves there. Among many others, Ellie and Sameh’s employer had facilities on the outskirts of Vancouver.

  They didn’t actually see that facility, though. Ellie was messaged as they landed, and given directions to a charter flight that would take them further inland. That was the advantage of being on an important errand for their very important employers, Ellie supposed. They didn’t have to wait for planes.

  They went to find the charter flight. They walked and stood on moving pathways, while Ellie held the loaner tablet out in front of her, letting it take pictures of what was in front of them so it could superimpose a route-guide into the image on the screen.

  Vancouver seemed nice. From what Ellie could see, it was full of tall buildings, and surrounded by mountains, and watched by an air-defense grid in case anyone across the nearby border did anything stupid. It seemed a lot like Sydney, but as they walked, Ellie noticed signs about security alerts and directions to bunkers, and others warning the tourists who were transferring on to Měi-guó adventure tours about the prevalence of firearms across the border.

  It was a reminder that they were actually quite close to a debtor-filled warzone, no matter how peaceful the airport might seem.

  Vancouver seemed secure, though. It felt safe in the airport, no matter what was outside, the same way it did in Dubai. The airport had obvious blast-glass windows and signs about bio-screening filters being installed, and there were drones in the sky outside, and heavily armed police around the airport, all the things that made a civilized place civilized.

  It was still awfully close to Měi-guó, though. There was really only the border wall between them and America.

  Ellie could actually see the wall. Part of it was visible across a large bay from the airport. The wall was an actual wall. A high concrete blast barrier lined with sensors and cameras and lights and gas-guns that was almost impossible to get past. When the Canadians had needed to protect their southern border, they had hired the Nigerians and Indians to do it, rather than trying to cope on their own, and the Nigerian engineers had modeled it after the fences surrounding the West African Viral Quarantine Zone. This was the longest land border in the world, Ellie had read somewhere, and probably the most secure. It was one of the most heavily militarized, too. There was a price for that security.

  Operating the wall was expensive, and that cost had been controversial when it was built, but it had been the best solution, everyone seemed to agree now. Canada had needed to do something when Měi-guó began to fall apart. They had needed to protect themselves, and prevent a flood of identity-less debt-ridden Americans pouring north across an open boundary. The Canadians had always liked the Americans, though, and so they had fortified and closed the border, but they also let those Americans who slipped through stay. Only the legitimate refugees, of course, those without personal debt. Those refugees were given new lives in Canada, and a chance to start again. The others, the debtors, those even Canada couldn’t do much with. They were obviously sold to workhouses, just as they were everywhere else.

  The Canadians were well-meaning, but they weren’t hopelessly sentimental. Ellie could see a work-gang collecting litter outside the airport as they went past.

  Ellie and Sameh walked through the airport, and Sameh glared nervously at anyone who got too close, the way she always did when she was about to get on a plane. They walked for a while, and eventually found their charter flight, and were greeted by a company security detail who were waiting for them at the gate. The security team vetted them, and passed them over to the pilot. The pilot was ready, and asked them to get aboard, and the three of them walked out onto the tarmac, to a light plane, and took off right away.

  Sameh gripped Ellie’s hand tightly as they did.

  They flew inland from Vancouver, staying north of the border, heading for a debt-recovery regional base somewhere inland, over the mountains and against the wall. Ellie could see they were flying north of the border, because she could see the wall out her window. The line of antenna towers for the sensor-net were obvious, even from this distance. Ellie could see where they were, but Sameh was nervous anyway. After sitting quietly for a while, Sameh leaned forward and asked the pilot if they were staying over Canada for the whole flight.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, sounding surprised.

  “If anything goes wrong, try and crash on the Canadian side,” Sameh said.

  The pilot grinned and glanced back and said they wouldn’t crash.

  “I’m serious,” Sameh said. “If anything happens, crash on the Canadian side. I’ll kill you myself if you land me on the Měi-guó side.”

  The pilot turned around again, and stared at Sameh for a moment, as if he couldn’t decide whether she was serious or not.

  “Fly the plane,” Sameh said sharply.

  He looked back at his controls.

  “And make sure you crash on this side,” Sameh said.

  “Leave him alone,” Ellie said to Sameh. “Let him drive. We aren’t going to crash.”

  “We might.”

  “We aren’t. Think of why we’re here.”

  Sameh looked at Ellie, but seemed not to understand.

  “Think why,” Ellie said. “What we’re doing is important. So this is the safest plane they have, and the best pilot.”

  Sameh thought about that.

  “Isn’t it?” Ellie said, to the pilot, and he nodded, seeming relieved.

  Apparently convinced, Sameh let herself be pulled back into her seat. “Leave him alone,” Ellie said to Sameh again. “Just look out the window.”

  “For missiles?” Sameh said.

  “If you like,” Ellie said.

  Ellie put Sameh’s seatbelt on her, mostly for the pilot’s sake, so he didn’t get nervous, thinking he might be attacked unexpectedly. Then she sat, and held Sameh’s hand, and looked out the window at the scenery they were flying over.

  They were going inland, along the wall, as it crossed a large mountain range. Ellie noticed they were flying between mountains as often as over them, so the mountains must have been high.

  Ellie looked out the window, and held Sameh’s hand, and Sameh gripped hers tightly and tried not to look scared. The flight took a couple of hours, so Ellie slept for a while once she got bored with the scenery.

  *

  A cold wind was blowing off the mountains they had just flown over as they landed at another base. They were still in Canada, still close to the border, at some kind of regional processing and monitoring centre the field personnel used as a rear-a
rea safe zone.

  A local official met them as they climbed out of their plane. He was Jackson, he said, and was already talking as they got out, saying he’d been told to expect them, and they would have all the cooperation they needed.

  He was holding out his hand towards Ellie too, apparently without thinking. Holding out his hand in a way no-one in the civilized world had done in generations. It was a nice sentiment, Ellie thought, but now she didn’t know what to do.

  Jackson just kept holding out his hand.

  Ellie looked at it for a moment, and Jackson didn’t take the hint, so in the end, slightly embarrassed, Ellie said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t…”

  Jackson flushed. “Of course,” he said. “I’m so sorry. The local customs…”

  “No worries,” Ellie said. “It’s fine.”

  They bowed to each other instead.

  The plane had stopped beside some kind of operations centre. It had probably been the terminal, back when this had been a small local airport. Jackson led them inside the building, and kept talking as he did. He was self-conscious now, Ellie thought. He was nervous, thinking he’d made himself look bad to the visiting VIPs, and so was talking too much, self-deprecatingly, just to fill the silence. He said sorry several times, and then started saying he’d gone native, that they all had here, that the facilities were primitive, and they had too much contact with the debtors and local people, and that they even ate food which had actually been grown in the ground and it was surprisingly pleasant once you got used to it, that he felt healthier and had more energy when he did.