by Leo Champion
Her finger flexed on the trigger of the crossbow, waiting for her target to emerge.
Chapter Thirteen
Justin Canis and his gang, five flyers in all, stood around the table in their common room, on the twenty-eighth-story top floor of an abandoned building directly adjacent to the pale blue Madison Park scraper. It was five minutes to nine and they were about to get into the air. Covering the table was a detailed map of the southern half of Manhattan, the silicate paper worn and marked in places.
“We’re going to be flying heavy,” Canis said, “so there’s not going to be so much room for maneuver. But we don’t really need it.”
“Go down to the Washington,” Guyotte nodded. He was mostly black and a couple of years older than Canis’ twenty-five, the number two man of the Sky Wolves. “Then beeline to the Charles Building, dogleg a bit to get on target but aim for the Charles vents after we’re done.”
“Yeah,” said Canis. “You got it.”
As contracted, the Sky Wolves were going to be flying heavy today. Each man would be loaded up with two twenty-pound fragmentation bombs, which were footballs of nitroglycerin wrapped inside scrap metal. They had not been cheap and Canis had been nervous ferrying the wrapped-in-heavy-padding bombs over from the Airedale, especially as he’d landed. They were also not things he wanted to be anywhere near when they did go off.
“Now, Billy Umashev’s going to be coming north from downtown on the same run,” Canis said, with a northwards gesture on the map. “So be careful not to fire on his guys. When our loads start dropping the crowds are going to flee, so – we’re both going to be hitting him at about five past nine. Just don’t fire on them, they’re friends.”
“But Charlie Marder’s going to be around somewhere,” Reynaldo muttered.
“Don’t tangle with anyone,” Canis clarified. “We ain’t being paid to fight the Marauders, we’re being paid to drop today’s load and get out of there.
There were noises of agreement from the other four.
“Let’s fly!”
* * *
“They’re drinking,” Don Karstein observed from the third floor of the Chapel, looking down past the balcony onto the tightly-packed crossroads. “Some of them are openly drinking.”
Hammer shrugged.
“Their day off, most of them. They can drink if they want to.”
“It’s disrespect the Reverend wouldn’t have tolerated.”
“I’m not the Reverend and I don’t feel disrespected. Lock, do you feel disrespected?”
The production manager shook his head.
“How about you, Colonel?”
Jacopo Benzi shrugged. “So long as they’re not soldiers on duty.”
“Have a drink yourself, Karstein,” said Hammer, checking his watch. He’d start at nine sharp, the way the Reverend always had, to throw the dice again on the population’s favour. Some of them, a lot of them, would be expecting workers’ committees, whatever exactly those even were, or however they were supposed to work. A lot of them would be hoping for a scrip buyback or exchange program, which he had promised them. They were going to get…
They were going to get what had been theirs all along anyway, but if he was lucky they’d credit him for it anyhow, at least enough to buy another week of loyalty…
The crowd’s buzz silenced as he came out, thousands of faces looking expectantly up at him.
“I want to thank you people for going to your jobs yesterday!” he began, wishing he’d made notes. But the Reverend’s pompous rambling had endeared him to nobody. He wasn’t out on this balcony to waste his people’s time; he had points to get to.
Dice to throw.
“I have two big announcements for the precinct today!”
* * *
“It’s gonna be workers committees,” Cam Krasner was saying next to Vinnie DiCarlo, who stood in the centre of the crowd with his wife and two kids. “He’s gonna hand the means of production over to us now!”
Krasner was in his early twenties, and worked on a trash scavenging and collection team. That, if you’d been doing it for long enough – and Krasner had been in that job since puberty, when you became an adult in the tenements – left a stain on your body that the lukewarm showers available to the raff just couldn’t really get out permanently. His hair was blond and curly, slicked with its permanent patina of grease, and right now he was dressed in his Sunday best, trousers and jacket that actually were somewhat clean. Pinned to the lapel of the old but ironed sports jacket was a clumsily cut red-and-white Communard rosette.
“Its gonna be workers’ committees!” Krasner’s girlfriend Miya Burgess, next to him, agreed. She was a short, pretty girl with long dark hair and she worked the counter of one of the precinct stores. “Bet you it is!”
“Shut up so we can hear him,” Maria DiCarlo told them.
* * *
Her targeting reticule was centred on the bridge of the tenement boss’ nose, the butt of the crossbow carefully laid against her right shoulder. Her index finger started to close over the weapon’s trigger, waiting for the right moment to take her shot. When they were cheering at something, she decided. It would be a distraction…
“Some people have asked,” Boss Hammer was saying to the attentive crowds, “when we will be collecting the weapons that spread through the tenement when the armoury was broken open. I said then that the right to be armed is the right not to be bullied; I will add now that only a prospective bully will take your arms from you, and I am no bully.”
There was the start of a cheer, and Diana Angela’s finger tensed – but Hammer gestured for silence and the crowd followed.
“Going forwards, it is allowed and encouraged for anyone who can afford weapons, to own and train in whatever weapons you can afford!”
What?
Diana Angela’s scope wavered over the speaking boss as she processed what he was saying. Spartacus had conducted rough and immediate sweeps for loose weapons – there’d been mass raff enlistment into the guards and the militias and those guys of course got weapons, but nobody else. Of course there was going to be a bit of disorder during the transition of power, but… Hammer wasn’t forming them into block militias and arming them in a supervised responsible context, he was allowing them to own guns as private individuals?
She could see some of his reasoning: he wanted an armed mob to balance the unreliable military. But he wasn’t afraid someone would use that mob against him?
Crazy damn pigeon, she decided as he continued. Her finger relaxed on the crossbow’s trigger, now a little curious as to what his second announcement would be.
Not that his last words would matter to anyone.
* * *
Hot exvent air blasted Justin Canis as he made his final circuit around the Washington Building, gaining height. Behind him were Fezzy, Reynaldo, Timmy the juve and then Goyette. Coming up from the downtown clusters would be Billy Umashev and his three Ubersmashers. So far there was no sign of Marder; a worst-case possibility had been the Marauders already in the air over the tenement, ready to pounce. He was probably on one of those rooftops somewhere below him, but that was fine. By the time they launched, the Wolves would be long gone.
A glance at his wristwatch showed it was a little past nine. Another circle would take more than five minutes. So he leaned his weight right, peeling off for the tenement. The fragmentation bombs were heavy in their rack and he was looking forward to getting rid of them.
The other Sky Wolves banked right behind him, one after the other, as the gang headed in.
* * *
There was one thing to be said for affiliating with a bunch of tennies, Mia DiIorio thought as she lay sprawled on a comfortable sofa that no airborne gang could have flown to a rooftop. They could cart things along the streets to you and hoist them up, and that was how you got heavy furniture!
“Hey,” said Marder from another of the sofas, pointing up as a group of airbornes peeled off in a direction that would take th
em over the tenement. “Fish, point that scope up. Is that Canis?”
Fish Townsend, the Marauder who’d survived – with a pair of broken ankles – being shot down during the coup, had a short telescope in his lap. He was a shaven-scalped bullet-headed man, presently sitting, his ankles in casts, in a cart the tennies had also winched up to the rooftops. Now he raised his short telescope.
“Wolf heads,” he reported immediately. “They got wolf heads painted on their wings – it’s definitely them.”
Marder was already moving. Now he spoke into the radio he’d picked from the coffee table.
“Sally, get those things of yours up and warn Hammer – they’re coming in now!”
* * *
The tennie craftsman named Roker, manning the radio on top of the Chapel, suddenly jerked up as he heard something. Santos and Denonile turned as the man said, “copy that, out” and looked at the chief grounder.
“Your gang lead, ma’am. Says they’re definitely coming. Right now!”
“You heard him!” Denonile snapped to the crew at the winch. “Get them up, now!”
The precinct didn’t have as many radios, at least that could be spared, as Denonile would have liked, she’d told Santos a little while earlier. So the other fourteen barrier balloons had been told to keep an eye on the Chapel and launch whenever this one did.
Now, a chock was kicked free of the winch and it started to unwind, the big black barrier balloon rising fast into the air on its rope, buffetted by the wind as it rose. Around the higher rooftops of the precinct, more balloons rose into the air, some of them dangling jellyfish-like strands of cord with broken glass glued to them.
“Look!” someone shouted, pointing.
From the direction of the Washington Building was a line of oncoming gliders. Definite attack path. Santos froze for a long moment before her friend grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Get below!” Denonile yelled. “Everyone without muskets or crossbows, get below!”
People started to scramble toward the roof hatch, while a couple of brave souls with crossbows started to ready them.
“Warn the people and get below!” Sally Denonile shouted again, shoving Santos toward the hatch.
* * *
“For as long as you have lived in what I hereby declare shall be called the Precinct of West Bowery,” Hammer said as the crowd listened and Diana Angela watched through the crosshairs of her weapon’s scope, “you have been merely tenants of your own housing! Required to ask a registry office’s permission, and pay bribes even to have that request heard, whenever you should want to move.”
There was a murmur of anger from the crowd, while Diana Angela raised an eyebrow slightly. Of course that was how it was. With virtue and identity politics playing a factor too, that was how housing was organized in the arkscrapers. With a lot of grandfathered exceptions, everybody was a tenant – your conurbation residency permit would be revoked without a valid tenancy or sub-tenancy – to whatever public-private partnership ran your building. Everyone rented.
“I declare now that in West Bowery you shall henceforth own your place of residence! The Housing Registry is abolished!”
There was the start of an uncertain cheer from the crowd, while Diana Angela’s mouth turned in a what the fuck? She’d expected a consolidation of housing for efficiency and accommodation of ideologically motivated newcomers, not…
“The adult occupants of a dwelling, as recorded in the last Housing Registry records, effective immediately own your dwelling! You may make whatever rental or sub-rental agreements you wish between yourselves, and in three months you will be able to sell this property to others. Because your rooms, your apartments, your closets and rooftops are yours now, no longer to be reassigned by Moncreve’s corrupt lackeys in the Housing Registry! I henceforth give you your own part of the precinct, as your own!”
There was cheering, which redoubled as the crowd realized what this meant.
“Can you dig it?” Hammer shouted over the cheering mobs. “Can you dig it? Can you dig it?”
And through the sniper scope, Diana Angela’s crosshairs wavered as she did.
He wasn’t just giving up most of the precinct’s apartments – handing the real estate to every last raff who happened to live somewhere. He was giving up the authority to tell his people where to live.
What is he doing?
People did not take power in order to give it up. From the closed-door committees of United Nations US-21s and -22s who had collectively ordered the purging of Lucius Theron, publicly ripping the stars off her mentor’s shoulders and exiling him from the world, down to the scrawniest streetgang leader fighting for trash… power centralized. If you had power you used it to take more power, and hope nobody took it from you. This boss was doing the opposite.
Just what the hell did he think he was doing?
She moved the crosshairs a safe distance upwards from his head, so that an accidental twitch of her finger might not ruin her curiosity. He’d just almost been interrupted, as the cheering died down and he’d been about to resume, by a short-haired woman who was speaking urgently to him.
Then he turned back to the crowd.
“I have just been informed that bombers are on their way in,” he told the crowd. “Clear the area and get underground!”
Then Diana Angela was looking at his back as he vanished inside.
“All military,” the short-haired woman said to the crowd, “report immediately to alert stations! Red alert. I repeat, we have declared a precinct-wide red alert.”
DA turned, looking at the sky. From the seventh-floor rooftop overlooking hers, and from other higher rooftops in the precinct, balloons were rising on long ropes. Past them, in the direction of the One Building, were oncoming airbornes.
* * *
The crossroads had been packed tight with people, but as Canis approached at two hundred and fifty feet and descending, they began to disperse. Damnit, he thought; surprise would have been nice. But he’d expected Hammer to have people watching the skies and ready, so losing that surprise hadn’t been any great shock. He was just glad not to have the Marauders circling overhead waiting and ready to jump them.
As he passed over East Houston Street, high buildings giving way to tenements, he saw movement. People on the high-building rooftops—
With crossbows! Shit!
A bolt narrowly missed Canis’ glider and he swung left a little, right a little, dodging. You couldn’t maneuver that much on an attack run between not-too-close exvents, you couldn’t afford to. They had to unload their ordnance and get out of here. He focused on what was in front of him, although a part of him was still well aware that the Marauders would be on their way now, or possibly descending.
Up from the roofs were rising big black balloons, tethered by ropes and bobbling in the wind. Rising up, in fact, right in front of him!
The balloons weren’t going to be the problem, Canis realized in a terrified split-second. They were well above him. It was the ropes holding them that were the real danger: he couldn’t avoid running into one of them without sharply turning into another – and in another second that option was gone.
Shit!
The left wingtip of his glider did scrape one of the ropes, arresting its movement for a second. It was as though he’d run, mid-air, into a tripwire; a horrified look up over his shoulder showed that the rope was pulling the balloon down onto him, not sliding off the leading edge of his wing.
Shit shit shit, he thought as his glider stalled. He was going to crash, oh shit.
The balloon bumped his glider’s left wing, tilting him sideways. Out of speed, out of lift, stalled and losing control…
He’d always wondered how the end would come. He’d expected it to be ground fire, not some – rope tied to a balloon!
His glider tilted further to the left and down further, speed and height both gone as the rope finally slid off his wingtip. Free!
There was no concei
vable way he’d make the Charles now, but his chances were better if he got rid of the forty-pound bomb load. His left hand yanked the rack’s catch-switch; both of the basketball-sized frag bombs tumbled downwards.
It wasn’t enough. He’d lost too much speed and there was another rope directly in his path…
Going down… into the population he’d been bringing frags to a gathering of.
Oh shit.
* * *
“This way!” Vinnie DiCarlo shouted amidst the stampede. He gestured west, along Prince Street. If the pigeons were coming from the north, the east-west street would be in their lee and the safest place in the precinct right now.
“This way!” Maria shouted. A middle-aged clerk going the other way blundered into Arnie, knocking his son down—
Cam Krasner grabbed the boy before he could fall too far, and gave the middle-aged clerk a shove back.
“Get underground!” someone shouted as they ran.
Explosions shook the precinct as people ran for their lives.
* * *
Through the scope of her crossbow, Diana Angela watched the gliders blunder into the ropes – that had to be their purpose! – holding the balloons up. With a mental command she’d set her implant to project most-probable two-second, five-second and ten-second cones of where the airbornes would be; the transparency grew thicker as you went from the thin shadow of ten-second projection likelihoods.