Time passes. The heating in the stairwells has always been middling at best, but right now it feels like I’m sitting in a refrigerator. At least I have my coat.
I’m sorry, I think at 22, wherever he is. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of a better way. I hope he and 06 didn’t get in too much trouble for what I did. At least I wasn’t still recording when he told me there used to be forty-eight kids. That probably wouldn’t’ve gone well for him. Then I almost wish I had been so I had his testimony to add to my little pile of evidence. For all the good it’d do. These jackasses wouldn’t believe that, either. Or wouldn’t care, which is worse.
At some point a message comes in from Jessa. hey, gonna hit the water line, you want me to save your place?
Water line. Guess I have been here a while.
I want to say no. Fuck the rations. I’m boycotting them. How can they be anything but bullshit, having seen what I’ve seen? How can I stand up against Stellaxis Innovations if I’m busy drinking from their cupped hand?
But I remember thirst, real thirst, like the time when my account got hacked and I got locked out of the water line for two weeks until it was resolved. If Jessa and the others hadn’t shared their rations with me, I’d be paying back the clinic bills for the rest of my natural life.
sure, I message back. yeah. there in a minute
i’ll grab your bottle for you
appreciate it
I close the chat. Immediately self-loathing settles on my shoulders, a familiar coat. I open it back up.
never mind. i’m not coming
what
i’ll buy water with the stream credits. i’m not taking any company handout. not anymore. i’m taking a fucking stand
There’s a pause, so long I assume she’s given up on my bullshit. While I’m waiting, I hear something going on downstairs.
I swipe away the feeds, pry myself up out of the corner of the stairwell where I’ve so ill-advisedly wedged myself, and stagger down the stairs, wincing as the blood returns to my legs.
As soon as I get to the ground floor, something’s obviously wrong. At first I think the several hundred people packed into the lobby are freaking out for the same reason Talya was, that Stellaxis has sent in some corporate muscle to do to this place what they did to B’s sister’s coffee shop. It wouldn’t take much down here, everyone crowded together and murmuring ominously about something as they are. A fleet of drones would do it. A few security bots with their wrist guns set to strafe.
But I don’t see anything like that. I don’t see anything at all. Just a crowd where this time of day there’s usually an orderly line. Some idiot daydreaming part of me wonders whether they’ve gathered here to set out on the march to Stellaxis HQ. That part of me pictures us striding across the city, gathering people to us until our crowd has snowballed into something big enough and angry enough to knock the whole place down.
But nobody notices me, and nobody else takes charge. They’re agitated about something, though. I see a man pick up a chair like he’s going to throw it through the glass front of the hotel, but someone talks him down. It doesn’t look like it’ll hold for long. A few other people start pushing one another, but their friends break it up before it escalates. Again, this looks like a temporary fix. A bandage on an open vein.
where are you
lobby, I reply. something’s going on
where, I’ll come to you
by the stairs
Jessa spots me and hurries over. “The fuck is this?”
I shake my head. “No idea.”
Some residual paranoia keeps me from drawing attention to myself by asking around. Jessa seems to have caught a bit of the same malady. We hang back and observe.
After a minute I realize how many of them are carrying their bottles and cups, just like the one Jessa’s holding. But they’re not in line.
All at once I realize what I’m looking at. Or what I’m not looking at. I should be looking at the rations cart. Huge plastic drums of water, wheeled around by armed guards. But I’m not. I double-check the time, which is wildly optimistic. All these people know what time it is. What should be here and isn’t.
Then one of the armed guards comes down the hall from the direction of the water-storage room. I don’t know if it’s the same one from last night, because he’s in full carapace with the visor down. Whoever he is, he’s got his rifle held at the ready. It flashes through my mind that I don’t know whether they use live rounds or riot-dispersal shot or lockout identification tags or what. From the way he’s leading with it, like it’s a flashlight he’s carrying into a dark room, we might be about to find out.
DISPERSE, comes the voice through the helmet, made louder and deeper by the built-in modulators. He flicks the safety off the gun and brings it to bear. YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF CUSTOMER-CITIZEN CODE OF CONDUCT REGULATION ELEVEN: UNAUTHORIZED ASSEMBLY. RETURN TO YOUR HOMES.
“This is our home!” somebody shouts.
VACATE THE PREMISES OR RETURN TO YOUR INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNED QUARTERS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. THIS AREA IS OFF LIMITS TO CIVILIAN ACTIVITY.
A few more shouts rise up.
“We’re just here for the water!”
“It’s water line. We come here every day! Every day at six! Where’s the water?”
“My children are thirsty. I’m nursing two babies. We need this water!”
THIS WATER DISTRIBUTION STATION HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED. DISPERSE.
“Discontinued? Did he say discontinued?”
“You can’t just turn off our water supply. What are we supposed to drink?”
WATER CAN BE PURCHASED AT YOUR LOCAL COMFORTS OF HOME BRANCH. FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD 24-HOUR SERVICE, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK.
“Yeah, for eight dollars a bottle!”
“A tiny bottle! Water line gives us a quart each for free!”
DISPERSE. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.
In illustration, the guard lets loose a volley of shots into the ceiling. It’s like hitting pause on the room. We all look up at the two dozen holes punched in the plaster. They don’t look like lockout identification tags or riot-dispersal shot.
From somewhere beyond the ceiling, the sound of something heavy toppling. A few people, presumably ones with residences on the second floor, bolt for the stairs.
And the room unpauses.
Someone hurls a garbage can through the glass of the double doors. A few other people take advantage of the commotion to dash for the water-storage room, or Comforts of Home, it’s hard to tell which. The guard whips around and strafes low, aiming for their legs, but someone else grabs the gun and the shots fly wide, chewing up a wall.
Then all hell breaks loose.
“Come on!” Jessa shouts in my face. People are storming into the street, trying to push their way into other buildings, presumably to get into those water lines instead. We squeeze out through the remains of the hotel door with them.
We didn’t even notice from inside, but the street out here is full. Crowds pouring out of buildings up and down the street. The elementary school, the movie theater, the bookstore. Anywhere that’s been repurposed as housing. People rush out of them and into the street, waving their bottles and buckets and cups. They’re all yelling.
More specifically: they’re all yelling about water.
From these same buildings, armed guards follow. One starts firing straight up into the air, but this crowd’s momentum is well beyond the stopping power of intimidation tactics. Another is bashing skulls with the butt of his gun. The guard from the hotel tears ass out the door past me and Jessa and does a flying tackle on a woman who was making a beeline for the old toy store. They go down in a tangle of limbs, and then the guard gets up off her and starts kicking. Two other women try to come to her aid, but another guard gets between them and the scene on the ground. There’s a crackle of electricity, and both women drop to the pavement, writhing.
“What the fuck—” Jessa breathes.
I grab her and fling us both back ag
ainst a wall as a security bot lands in the middle of the street and starts nanotagging people indiscriminately. I don’t know if these tags are the lockout kind or the neurotoxin kind or some other kind I haven’t seen, and I don’t want to stick around to find out. I don’t even know where this fucking thing deployed from. It just dropped out of the sky to land in this action-movie stance, one hand one knee, stood smoothly, and started firing.
We hustle into the little nook between the hotel and the old office building next door and hide behind the mailboxes, staring out at the street. Jackson’s back here, and some girl I vaguely recognize from a different floor of the hotel, and about a half dozen people I don’t know at all.
“No, seriously,” Jessa whisper-shouts. “What the fuck?”
I still don’t have an answer to that, so she turns to Jackson, who shrugs, wide-eyed.
“Nobody said anything,” says one of the others, a guy about our age. “We went down to get water. They said no water.” He shows us an empty soda bottle with the label peeled off. It’s been reused so many times that his name, permanent-markered onto the side, is faded to illegibility.
“Yeah, they cut off the whole hotel,” Jackson tells him. “We were there too.”
Soda bottle guy looks confused. He jerks his head sideways toward something up the road. “I’m at the school.”
Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong. No way can all the water lines be out. Not with all that green grass, those fountains, that ornamental pond still in evidence. All the eight-dollar bottled water stacked in their neat six-foot-high pyramids at Comforts of Home. This is something else.
I have to stream this. I have to show people what’s happening here.
But I can’t. My lenses won’t interface. It’s like power curfew came early today.
They threw us into blackout deliberately. Just in time for whatever’s about to happen here.
In comes a helicopter, whipping in low and fast from the direction of the city proper. This one’s got the typical loudspeaker but also simulcasts the same lines on a holoscreen projected above the rotors. Which makes sense, really. The noise on the street is beyond deafening. It’s a wall of sound you could practically reach out and touch.
“What’s he saying?” Jessa shouts next to my ear.
I shake my head. “There’s a holoscreen—” I point up. The projection ring hovers over the rotors like a halo, words slowly marching around its outer edge. Just too far away to make out.
There’s a pause while Jessa peers upward, shading her eyes, zooming in on the slowly marching caps-lock. Or tries to. “Are your lenses working?” she yells. “Mine are dead.”
“Power curfew’s early today,” I say, lifting my chin at the helicopter.
Jessa freezes. “They didn’t.”
“Somebody sure did.”
Whatever’s going on, there must be two thousand people out here. It’s like some giant hand picked up each one of these buildings and shook all its inhabitants out onto the street. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even the crowd at the annual Valued Customer Appreciation Day parade is probably smaller than this, and today I don’t exactly see any reps dressed up like the company mascot throwing free samples and water coupons to the crowd.
Then the holoscreen drifts close enough to make out if I squint. The words hit the pit of my stomach like rocks.
DISPERSE. DISPERSE. THE STELLAXIS INNOVATIONS WELLSPRING™ WATER DISTRIBUTION PROGRAM HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED IN YOUR LOCALITY. RETURN TO YOUR HOMES IMMEDIATELY. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL BE ADDRESSED WITH FORCE. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING. DISPERSE.
“Our locality?” Jessa’s voice cracks with panic. “The hell does that even…”
She trails off, taking in the magnitude of the situation. We can’t see a whole lot from back here, but what we can see doesn’t look good. The security bot is marching slowly up the street, one step and spray, one step and spray. People run past, carrying their water containers, carrying their children, even carrying protest signs, some of them, that they must have gone back into their rooms to draw with markers on whatever they had to hand. Pizza boxes. Paper plates. Old t-shirts.
Riot cops are dropping down out of the helicopter, activating their wrist-mounted shield projectors as their boots hit street. A man tries to dodge past one, but the cop pivots at the last second so the man slams full force into the shield. He’s flung back maybe eight feet by the force field, smashing backward through what’s left of the glass front of the movie theater.
Somewhere, someone tries to start up a chant, and their voice is joined by a few others before they all stop abruptly for some reason I can’t see.
A teenager runs past and hurls her empty red plastic cup at one of the riot cops. It melts on contact with the shield. Another cop tackles her, landing on her hard enough to bounce her head off the street. I don’t see her get back up.
“Guys,” Jackson is saying. “Guys, come look at this.”
He’s climbed up the back of the mailboxes and is staring out at something above the buildings. I’m closest, so I scramble up after. It’s a measure of the weirdness of this day that I let him reach down and grab my wrist to help me. I get up there and almost fall right back off my perch when I see what he was looking at.
The buildings are pretty low in old town. Nothing like the city proper, where probably ninety percent of the buildings top thirty stories. The hotel and the office buildings, fifteen-twenty stories apiece, are the tallest we have. Most of those are behind or beside us, giving me a clear view over the movie theater, the toy store, and so on.
There’s not just one helicopter. There are four. And lots more where those came from, probably, beyond my narrowed field of vision as it is. But the ones I can see are disgorging their security bots and riot cops and drone fleets, not only here in our street, but in the next one, and the next, and the next.
It’s not just the hotel that’s been cut off. It’s not just this street. It’s old town. All of it.
And I’ve got a growing suspicion it’s all because of me.
“Come on.” Jessa is tugging at my pant leg. “We gotta go. We gotta go right now.”
I jump down, and someone else climbs up into the vacated space. “Go where?” I shout. I can barely hear myself. “This place is—” I don’t know what it is. It’s too one-sided to be a war zone. It’s being quashed too effectively to get traction as a riot, or even a protest. It’s too tidy to be a bloodbath. “We go out there, we end up like that.” I point at the twitching body of a man who looks to have recently gotten up close and personal with the business end of an implant-delinker beam. If somebody doesn’t drag him out of the way, he’s going to get trampled before he remembers how to use his legs.
But I can’t seem to remember how to use mine, either. It’s like a lag spike, but I’m not in the game. Just like that man won’t respawn when he dies, and I don’t have any ten-second cloaks, and I can’t go out there sticking heal patches on protesters as the riot cops batter at their heads.
“—go back in,” Jessa is saying.
I look at her blearily.
“Snap out of it. Where’s the Mal who led all those people to safety when there was a goddamn citykiller mech on her ass?”
I don’t know. Whatever that was, it was a one-time power-up, and I don’t have another.
Jessa pulls harder. “We gotta get the fuck out of here before one of those riot cops decides to look back here.”
“Not happening. I’m not going out there.”
“No shit. Listen. We go back in and lie low until this blows over. We—”
A fireball erupts at the doorstep of the hotel beside us.
Blue. The fireball is blue.
“Oh fuck,” I hear myself whisper, at the same time our entire hiding place falls into deep shadow.
We look up and up and up until we’re staring into the armor-plated face of what at least in-game is called a shadowstrider mech. I didn’t even know Stellaxis had these. Big-ass mechs hav
e never really been their style. They must have copied the Greenleaf design. Which is: smaller than the citykiller, the same approximate height but more slender. It’s built for stealth, inasmuch as a mech can be. Certainly it’s come here out of apparently nowhere. It may as well have spawned here on the street.
We’re all standing here gawping up at it like a bunch of morons when it turns its colossal head with colossal slowness, rightward and downward, and its visored gaze alights on me.
This is not eye contact. Intellectually I know that. The domed roof of the pilot module starts a solid six feet below the faceplate. Still, that giant head stares at me, then turns a few degrees to give the inferno of the hotel sidewalk a pointed look, then back to me.
It’s two seconds, maybe three. Then the shadowstrider turns and stalks away eastward up the street. It doesn’t deploy any more weaponry. It doesn’t engage. The one shot it did take didn’t even do any damage. A couple of degrees higher and the plasma-cannon shot would have turned the lobby into a firestorm. But it didn’t. The mech just tossed it directly on my doorstep like a paper bag full of dog shit on fire. And made sure I was watching. And only then walked away.
“Did—” Jessa falters, tries again. “Did it just—”
“I, um.” Whatever’s gotten hold of Jessa’s voice has mine, too. I swallow. It doesn’t seem to take. “I think it did.”
“Subtle.” For some godforsaken reason, Jessa’s grinning. “Got you, you fucker.”
I open my mouth to ask her what she means, but that’s a stupid question. It’s Jessa. I know exactly what it means. I glance down, and she’s got that ancient pocket screen cupped in her palm, angled to catch the mech while being at least mostly hidden from view.
“That’s a threat,” she continues. “That was one million percent a threat.” She grabs me by the coat front, eyes shining. It’s like her fear of the riot cops has been eclipsed for these few seconds while she beams into my face. “They are trying to shut you up. And I have proof. Say hi to Mal, everybody! Now go blow this up. They took our water. Now we burn them down. They can’t—”
Firebreak Page 24
