by Leo Champion
“So what can we do for you, Boss?”
“I’m going to talk with them, any who are fit to talk. Don’t let me get in your way.”
“Joe, take the list to the Chapel,” Wohlrab said to the kid.
Hammer scribbled a note telling Ali to authorize everything on the list and send people to make the purchases from the nearest Exchange.
There were people with limbs blown or cut off, or that would have to be amputated. About forty of Hoshi’s streetgangers and thirty more civilians who’d been badly hurt in the bombing raid. As he slowly made his way between them, talking with people, giving the streetgangers encouragement and the civilians promises of revenge – “I’ve put bounties on the heads of the scum responsible” – he saw his own vision of hell.
This shit had not been evident, he thought, from four hundred feet when you dropped the bombs. The human cost. He’d never, that he could recall anyway, bombed a gathering like this. Would he have? Like Canis had said, business was business. You flew runs for money, because you needed money to live.
From four hundred feet you didn’t see the carnage and you didn’t hear the screams, the moans, the crying and prayers of those who would be lucky to spend the rest of their lives crippled.
But the streeters had taken those casualties fighting for him, and the least he could do was promise them safe homes for as long as he held the precinct.
“What if the Rev comes back? We’re dead then,” said a streetganger girl who’d taken a musket ball through the thigh, breaking the bone and narrowly missing the femoral.
“They’ll slaughter us in these beds,” said another streetganger with a bloody bandage over his left forearm, which had been cut wide open by a swordstroke. He’d also had his chest cut open, but that stroke had somehow avoided anything vital and the cut had been stitched up. It was touch and go and too soon to tell, the nearest nurse had quietly said to Hammer, as to whether an injury like that would kill him or not.
“We’re going to respect their prisoners and wounded,” said Hammer. “If he respects you, anyway. If he doesn’t, there’ll be reprisals.”
He didn’t like the idea of punishing grunts for decisions their leaders had made. But those grunts would be the ones executing his people, and if the threat of killing a few of the Reverend’s men would keep them from doing that…
They were his people. The eighty-four wounded people crowded into his hospital were there because of him. It took almost two hours to get through all of them, answering their questions and making promises to care for injured breadwinners’ families.
“For as long as I’m in charge you won’t starve,” Hammer said to a woman whose husband had lost a leg in the bombing. “Neither will he or your kids.”
He left needing a stiff drink. Several stiff drinks, although he was only going to have one.
I spent most of my life causing injuries like these, and deaths.
Seeing them up close – sucks.
* * *
“This is your boomstick,” said the hard-faced woman in her thirties who’d introduced herself as Lieutenant Ursula Frusci. She held up one of the weapons to show Vinnie diCarlo, Cam Krasner, and about a dozen other raff workers in the narrow alley. “Also known as a one-shotter, a zip shotgun, or a flashgun. You’ve bought your own and it’s time for you to learn—don’t point it at me!”
Lieutenant Frusci stepped sideways and moved forwards to brush aside the weapon a man named Petey Seidel had covered her with, roughly swatting it away and almost out of Petey’s surprised hands.
“It’s empty,” that man said.
Frusci hit him across the face, a hard slap.
“You never treat ‘em as empty, that’s rule one. All guns are always loaded and what you each just bought is a gun!”
His didn’t really look like one, although it had cost Vinnie a day and a half’s pay. He inspected the weapon he was carrying, careful to keep the muzzle aimed up – at the darkening sky, not at his own chin as Cam Krasner seemed to be doing.
The boomstick was an eighteen-inch length of steel pipe from an Exchange, one of the automated trade centers some arkscrapers had at their bases for the purpose of channeling refined and purified materials back up into the scrapers. Its bore was about three quarters of an inch, open on one end but plugged on the other except for a tiny hole. Another short chunk of pipe, a handle, was crudely welded at right angles to the barrel at that end.
“Rule two,” said Lieutenant Frusci, “is that you never point your new gun at anything you don’t intend to fuckin’ blow away. Three is you make sure you know what you are pointing at, and the fourth rule is that you look past the target. You all clear on that?”
There was a chorus of agreement, including from Vinnie. Yeah, he got that, it made sense.
Lieutenant Frusci scowled.
“You say you get it, but if one of those things goes off and hurts someone, you’re gonna be in deep shit. Hanging shit, if someone dies because of it, is that clear? Keep ‘em all pointed that way, toward the backstop.”
Some pocked and chipped concrete blocks had been set up across the alley, about twenty feet from where the group stood. Vinnie shrugged and aimed his empty gun that way, taking care not to cover Cam Krasner.
“Yeah, these things look like crude hunks of steel, but they’ll kill as dead as any musket or bolt-action gun,” Lieutenant Frusci said. “So watch carefully, here’s how you handle them.”
The hard-eyed, black-haired woman took a paper cartridge of blackpowder from her pouch – “you’re gonna have to make and measure your own cartridges, take a close look at the amount of powder in the ones we gave you to start with” – and emptied it down the muzzle of her weapon. Vinnie tried to imitate her, but about a third of his powder ended up on the ground instead.
“Then you take your shot” – from her other pouch, Frusci took a heavy pinch of it – “and shove that down after the charge.”
Vinnie reached into his own shot pouch, which contained shredded cubes and balls of lead and gold. He’d read somewhere that the yellow metal had once been incredibly valuable in itself, before the spacers had harvested effectively unlimited amounts of it from asteroids. Now the value of the stuff was primarily as a malleable conductor. The malleability meant it shredded into shot easily, and the conductivity made it more common on the streets than the lead it was mixed up with.
He took a heavy, four-fingered, pinch of the metal shot and dropped it down the barrel, then followed it with a bit more.
“Now,” said Frusci, when everyone had loaded their weapons, “you can take a bit of cardboard and shove it down the muzzle after your powder and shot – keeps them from falling out. But then you get the ramstick and stick it down the muzzle to get everything all the way down.”
“Now, you should have a nice load of powder flush against the closed end, right?”
Vinnie could tell by the weighting of his boomstick that this was probably the case, yes.
“You see the tiny little hole in the bottom? You touch your cigarette lighter – oh, for fuck’s sake, not all of you got lighters.”
DiCarlo didn’t smoke; he couldn’t afford to, with a family. But Cam Krasner next to him was unmarried and carried a plastic butane lighter. So did three or four of the others.
“Share ‘em for now, I guess,” said Lieutenant Frusci irritably. “Fuckin’ raff, you don’t think ahead, do you? How’d you fuckin’ think you were gonna spark the charges, with mental telemetry?
“So you point, you light the little hole, and…”
Krasner handed his lighter over to Vinnie, who carefully, nervously, keeping the muzzle of the flashgun aimed carefully down the alley, lit it and touched it to the hole.
Boom!
There was a flash, flames leaping half a yard from the gun’s muzzle, and a bigger kick than he’d expected. A cloud of acrid white smoke followed the muzzle-flash and stayed in the air.
“Yeah, now you try,” Frusci pointed at another man.
One by
one each of the raff fired their new weapons; the smoke soon became hard to see through, stinging Vinnie’s eyes and tickling his lungs uncomfortably. People coughed and sneezed, or tried to fan it away from themselves. Lieutenant Frusci for her part seemed unaffected by it; used to it, Vinnie realized.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You are now qualified to use your weapons, welcome to Seventh Company.”
“We’re soldiers?” Cam Krasner asked excitedly, running a greasy hand through his curly blond hair.
“Not quite, but there’s rules in war. Didn’t know that, did you? You carry a weapon, you gotta mark yourselves as a fighter. So you tie one of these” – Lieutenant Frusci handed Jimmy a strip of green cloth about a foot long by a couple of inches wide – “around your upper arm, got it? And another one over your head like a bandanna.”
“That’s no uniform,” someone protested. The tenement’s soldiers wore full green shirts above dark blue jeans and black boots. Not just strips of cloth.
“It’s enough of one that we know what side you’re on,” said Lieutenant Frusci. “You obey all soldiers all the time. Any of us say to do something, you jump to it, clear?”
* * *
As the two men headed up the dark and battered stairs of their apartment building, John Brasci came up and said “Hey guys, there’s going to be a meeting tonight at eight.”
He handed Vinnie a street-printed pamphlet whose header, a little blurred, said ‘Ten Points For Equality’.
“The speaker’s gonna be a guy who was a part of the original Commune and got away. He’s gonna be telling us about our rights and how to take them.”
Vinnie shook his head. “I’ve got to work on my plans, sorry.”
Some months ago, Vinnie had invented a way to heat up the composting bins of his organics plant. The plant manager, Mrs. Moncreve, had ripped up the proposal and had one of the helmeted First Company thugs hit him for suggesting that he might know better than the people in charge.
But now those people, the Moncreves along with all of First Company, had been kicked out on their asses. Mr. Lock had asked him for the plans again, so he was recreating them from memory and drawing up a specific list of the items needed to make it happen.
“Our rights are more important than your plans,” said Brasci.
Vinnie handed the pamphlet back.
“And be careful with those, I don’t need it. They’ll flog you if they find it in your possession.” Well, perhaps not any more, Vinnie thought. But he didn’t want to be the test case on that.
“We’re going to take the means of production,” said Brasci. “If President Hammer isn’t going to give them over, we’re going to take them for ourselves.”
Vinnie shook his head, sympathetic but not wanting to get involved. He was already on track to get a bonus.
“I’ve got work to do, man. Sorry. Another time.”
“All I’m asking you to do is” – Brasci paused to recall the phrase – “consider your class interests. Keep that gun ready, because you might have to use it in any direction.”
Chapter Seventeen
Valentine’s Day advertising bombarded her as she headed along the hundredth-floor concourse of the Scalner Building, the crowds a sea of pink. She wore a pink suit herself, with white heels; it would have been out of place for a well-socialized US-13 to not follow social conditioning, and pretending to be normal on the superficial level was the defining behaviour of life in the upper Intendancy. You consumed as you were told to, you conformed like everyone else, you contributed to an economy that had made most human labour obsolete more than a century ago.
Of course, next year the fashion would be slightly different – Diana Angela’s trained eye could tell even without her implant, the handful of people who’d seen fit to reuse previous years’ outfits – requiring new purchases that cost a little more; that was how you got the perception of economic growth nowadays, by socially conditioning people into believing that the cosmetic changes were actually improvements worth paying more for.
It was how you got the appearance of economic growth without creating actual value, and someday it would all come crashing down apocalyptically. Theron’s projections five years ago had given the world three to four decades until that happened – but she wasn’t going to think about that now.
Checkpoints blocked the skyway that led to the Independent Hotel, projected holograms and directed audio notifying her as she approached that she was entering an implant-disabled zone, that past this point implants would not be able to connect, and one entered at one’s own risk.
The Independent was the only place in the city, and one of just two in the conurbation, where anyone who wished could walk down to the streets from the arks. You had to agree to waivers that amounted to ‘we are not responsible for your life if you pass this point’, since legally there was no difference between the hotel’s hundredth-floor lobby and open ground outside tenement walls.
“Yes, I understand,” she told the checkpoint, placing her index finger on its touch pad. The barrier bar flicked up to let her through.
There were any number of reasons a US-13 might go to the Independent; some of the other people going through these stiles had silver wreaths or stars on their shoulders. Anonymity was one of them; she’d heard from the direction of Uncle Hugo that a lot of the United Nations’ real business was actually done in the parlours, common rooms, hallways and restaurants of this place.
At the far end of the skyway was the Independent’s own security. Screening was far more thorough going the other way, where biometric scans, retinal reads and deep-implant pings would triple-verify your identity and residence permit before allowing you back into the arkscraper network. The hotel’s concern was to keep potentially dangerous objects out – real weapons, of course, had always been illegal for private ownership in the arkscraper networks, but the Independent believed firmly in the psychological value of security theatre.
Everything from steak knives identical to the ones in the Independent’s restaurants down to, depending on the day, hairpins and shaving razors could and usually would be confiscated. Diana Angela had heard that the right to this confiscated loot was a perk the security guildsmen valued, and they could get greedy. The woman in front of her was politely but firmly asked for the chopsticks in her hair.
“Ma’am, we enforce the same security here as on the ground floor,” said the elaborately-uniformed screening guard as he palmed the ivory sticks. “It’s for everyone’s safety, including your own.”
At least modern scanners had done away with the need to undress; she went through the security scanner with her shoes and jacket on. There were scanners but no cameras, and none of the screening guards asked her for identification; part of the point of this place was a degree of anonymity.
This uppermost lobby was a high-ceilinged expanse of smooth white marble, black leather sofas and planters full of thick ferns whose locations channelled the eye toward four downward-facing elevator banks. It was filled with a sea of pink and baby-blue suits; two thirds of the women and a goodly percentage of the men here were celebrating the directed economic event that was Valentine’s Day.
Technically at this point you were on the street, and to reassure arkie customers there was a heavy presence of elaborately-uniformed human security guards with tasers and pepper spray. The ones on the ground lobby, of course, had automatic weapons despite being surrounded by Midtown – or perhaps because of that. The Hotel was physically in Times Square but stayed true to its name in resisting Kalashov’s control; that was the one thing that united its Byzantine internal politics of union, guild, shareholder, and management factions.
She headed for the moneychippers’ counter on the left. The street data networks were strictly firewalled at every level from those of the arkscrapers; her implant, although this building’s electrostatic fields would make it fritz uselessly here anyway, was physically unable to connect to the systems in the Independent and the intermittent patchw
ork of them you got in the tenements. Different code running older protocols on incompatible hardware, connecting through different frequencies. So the payment chip embedded in her right index finger was useless here. Instead she had a pair of microchipped fixed-value cards, each worth five hundred dollars.
Any change or money left unspent – for collective business reasons, the Independent’s various enterprises, departments, and guilds discouraged that – could be brought back here for deposit onto a new fixed-value chip that she could take through security and deposit into her account. One might in theory be able to launder street-earned cash into one’s arkscraper account a little bit at a time, but any significant amounts would draw notice.
She’d considered cultivating a gambling habit – the Independent had four official casinos, and there were more in Times Square – but there was no need. A US-13’s salary was about a million and a half of the dollars that might have been physically minted in North America, but whose value was determined by the fiscal policy boards of the United Nations.
“How would you like these, Lady Under-Intendant?” asked one of the moneychanging clerks as she ran the chips through a verification scanner.
“Eight hundreds, the rest twenties.”
Along the counter to Diana Angela’s immediate right was a tall, muscular – very muscular, probably enhanced – man in his apparent twenties, wearing a sleeveless black top and midnight-black pants tucked into silver boots that reached past his kneecaps. Covering his shaved scalp and huge arms was subdermal ink, a zoo of hundreds of brightly-coloured serpents that twisted and writhed across his body. Over his eyes without straps, so glued or augmented, was a presently-inactive pair of dark goggles, and by his feet was a heavy black duffel bag.
As Diana’s clerk counted crisp bills off for her, she watched the flashy you-know carefully slide a single chip across the counter.
“Straight Bwalyas, bitch,” he told the moneychipper across from him.
The woman ran and verified the chip, then began counting off thousand-dollar bills with Secretary-General Banji Bwalya’s round, dark Zambian face looking out from their centres. Her fingers moved with the dextrous rapidity of a casino dealer under the you-know’s careful eye – ten, eleven, twelve thousand before she reached into another compartment of her drawer for smaller bills. Someone going on a one-way trip, Diana Angela thought, or thinks he is. These people were never as tough as they thought they were.