I hadn’t listed billeting on my original to-do list, but Billy Conklin, a local building contractor, convinced me we needed someone to honcho space management. He wore cowboy boots under his work pants and a cowboy hat so stained, worn, and crumpled it was hard to tell what it was right away, and he sported an accent to match. I got the feeling he had a lot of experience convincing people they really needed things they’d never thought of before, which was just the sort of skill set I needed, right? He was smooth, all right, with his feigned bumpkin act, but I suspected I might have to keep an eye on him. I have an instinct for guys who are so sure they’re smarter than everyone else in the galaxy, they always have a couple extra things going on the side.
He was right about space management, though; we had too much critical material looking for a place to live, and would probably have a lot of people fighting for that space as well pretty soon. A couple of the outlying residential buildings would have to be evacuated to make the perimeter more defensible. Where would we put those people? Billy got a spray-painted jacket for his trouble and a new job. He already knew carpenters, welders, plumbers, and finishers he’d hired or worked with. I gave him two spray bottles and told him to draft anyone he needed.
I found our head medic on my own. Dr. Tanvi Mahajan was the director of the community clinic and pitched in with the doctoring as well. Her appearance struck me immediately: well-dressed, trim figure, hair neatly pulled back, and face bearing the prominent scars of childhood acne. If anyone had access to cosmetic surgery, especially something as simple as this, it would be a doctor, but she’d never fixed it. I got the feeling she was pretty comfortable with who she was. She was also the only person I met that morning who didn’t seem flustered or a bit overwhelmed. She took five minutes and told me exactly what shape the clinic was in, what she expected would be the things they’d have a hard time dealing with, and what she needed to take care of it all. She got to keep her job with some new challenges. She’d need a lot more space for trauma patients, preferably adjacent to the current clinic. Talk to Billy Conklin about that. She’d also need to secure whatever medical supplies she could, and get Petar Ivanov working on fabricating more.
Moshe Greenwald was my last acquisition that morning. Moshe was short, thick, and balding, at least ten years older than me, and his coveralls stretched taut across his broad belly. A hand-rolled lit cigarette dangled from his lips. The sleeves of his coveralls were rolled up, and I spotted a tattoo on his right forearm: a big gold and red spaceship. Not a real spacecraft, mind you, but what people thought they would look like a hundred or so years ago—a sleek torpedo-shaped hull sporting big swept-back fins and a fiery exhaust. I figured either he had a strange sense of humor or he was drunk when he got that ink.
I found him unbolting the LENR generator from an abandoned Munie van. LENR stood for Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, what they used to call cold fusion. An LENR generator didn’t kick out a lot of power, but it was steady and low-maintenance.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.
He looked up and squinted at me over the forward chassis of the van. “I’m paintin’ my nails. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“We’re going to need that generator you’re stealing.”
He carefully took his cigarette out and balanced it on the hood of the van, straightened up, hefted the power wrench, and looked at Ivanov. After a couple seconds he put the wrench back down and picked up the cigarette.
“I don’t know you,” he said, “but I work for Bogo Katranjiev, head of the Citizens’ League. He told me to get a working LENR generator and bring it back to his office, which is what I’m doing.”
“Can you dismount that thing without screwing it up?”
His face twisted in a sour expression. “For three years I crewed on a deep space C-lighter, engineering department. Then eighteen months I spent grounded here, waiting for another lift ticket. Seven days ago I got one, seven days! I was scheduled to ride the needle to orbit tomorrow, and then all this tsuris breaks loose! Can I dismount an LENR generator? One time I bypassed a burned-out power junction, ran carbon cable by hand to pump a SMESS from a half-gig fusion reactor so we could make jump. You even know what a SMESS is?”
“No.”
“Then shut up and let me work.” He leaned over and picked up his power wrench.
“You think this is the best use of your time,” I asked, “pulling one little LENR generator to run an office suite?”
“Not my department.”
“Turn around and put your hands up,” I ordered.
He looked like he might argue the point, but when Ivanov took a slow step toward him he laid down the wrench and did as I’d told him.
“You’re gonna be sorry,” he said.
“Hope not,” I answered as I sprayed “LOG” on his back in big bright letters.
“Hey! What the hell?”
“Turn around,” I ordered and I did his front.
He touched it with his fingers, looked at the still-wet streak of paint.
“See, now it is your department,” I said. “You still work for Katranjiev, or rather the Emergency Citizens’ Troika, but from now on you report to me. I’m Sasha Naradnyo, head of logistics, and you’re now head of the power division. We’re gonna need lots of it. There are solar panels, vehicle skins, LENR generators lying around all over. What do we need to do to get them concentrated, secured, and on a grid?”
He thought for a couple seconds, looked around the street half-filled with nervous people hurrying here and there, trying to make their own preparations. He looked back and opened his mouth but I cut him off.
“Not now. Two hours from now at the clinic. Between now and then, recruit whatever technicians you can find. Here’s two spray bottles. Have an outline plan of action by then and a list of what resources you need. No telling what I can actually give you, but it’ll be nice to have a wish list. You got any questions?”
He looked around some more and then nodded to the LENR generator in the van.
“What about that?” he said.
“It’s your call. If you decide that generator needs to be in that office suite, then get somebody else on it. But if I catch you turning a wrench anytime in the next two hours, my friend Ivanov here is going to break both your arms, just so you won’t be distracted from your real job anymore. Understand?”
To my surprise, he laughed and nodded.
“By the way, what is a SMESS?” I asked.
“Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage System. It’s like a big donut only made from superconducting cables. You know, no resistance, so you put electricity in, it just goes round and round until you need it.”
“Sounds like maybe we could use one of those. Any around here?”
He just laughed.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later I stopped back at the dilapidated wood frame and sheet metal building which housed the offices of the Merchants’ and Citizens’ Association and was also becoming the headquarters of the Sookagrad Emergency Citizens’ Troika, which made sense as, of the three groups that made it up, only the Merchants’ and Citizens’ Association was actually legal. I wanted to check in before my department head meeting and see how everyone was dealing with my sudden promotion from Traitorous Running Dog to Chief of Logistics. I wasn’t sure what sort of working relationship I could manage with Katranjiev, or with Dragon Lady for that matter, but it was time I found out.
As Ivanov and I turned the corner on the winding, narrow street a short block from the headquarters, I saw a sight which excited and scared me at the same time: a group of four Varoki Munies, looking a little roughed up but not really injured as far as I could tell. They still had their sidearms but they hadn’t drawn them, and they were under the guard of a half-dozen citizens, assorted firearms raised and pointed.
“Let’s not scare anyone,” I told Ivanov. “We don’t want this to turn ugly. Those four Varoki could be very important to us.”
He looked at me. “You like leatherheads,” he said, in his rumbling bass voice.
“Most of my life I was a criminal, and I spent most of that time ducking the Munies on Peezgtaan. I got no love for them, but times change. These guys could solve some problems for us.”
I tried to find out what was up but the civilian guards didn’t know anything useful. They were just covering the Munies until word came back from inside what to do with them. Three of the Munies were patrol officers, looking scared and way out of their depth. The fourth one was older and wore the rank stars of a police captain. He looked more depressed than scared—maybe resigned to his fate was a better description. None of them really wanted to talk to me, at least not yet.
“Keep an eye on things out here, would you?” I said to Ivanov. “Wouldn’t want anything stupid to happen.”
“Because may be more useful alive than dead,” he said.
That was a very utilitarian way of looking at it, and there was a lot to be said for utilitarianism. But there was something to be said for being on the side of the angels as well, not that it was ever easy to figure out which side that was. I sometimes think that the cause you back has less to do with where the angels roost than how you go about backing it. That said, I also think some causes can stain you so deeply that no quantity of good deeds will ever cleanse your karma. So if you’re looking for simple answers, some universal formula that will get you through life with your soul intact, try looking where the light’s better.
Inside the offices I found Dragon Lady and Katranjiev arguing about what to do with the Munies. They made an interesting physical contrast: Katranjiev tall and skinny, fair-haired and long-faced, the Dragon Lady none of those things.
She was fiftyish—which was older than I’d have thought from her voice—and a little stocky, but she moved as if she was in good shape. She wasn’t beautiful, but I’d call her distinguished-looking. “A handsome woman,” people might have said once upon a time, or would have if it weren’t for her eyes, which were stricken and angry-looking at the same time, as if they had seen too much and now disliked seeing anything at all. Other than being a former legal counselor, the current head of a Humanist resistance cell, and ill-tempered, I didn’t know much about her. I’d at least found out her name: Desislava Bogdanovna Zdravkova, which as names go would have been a mouthful if my own folks hadn’t been Ukrainian. She was second-generation Bulgarian like Katranjiev and a lot of the folks in Sookagrad.
Between all those Bulgarians, Nicolai Stal the Russian, and me the Ukrainian, this was starting to look like a reunion of the Slavic diaspora.
Zdravkova and Katranjiev both glared at me when I walked in.
“What do you want, Naradnyo?” Katranjiev demanded. “I only went along with Stal’s idea of giving you a job because I thought it would keep you too busy to cause trouble.”
“Boy, were you wrong.”
“I imagine you’re here to plead for the lives of those four leatherheads,” Zdravkova said.
“As it happens, you’re exactly right, although since the Munies haven’t done anything but get themselves whacked for protecting us Humans, I’m not sure why their lives would need pleading for. But here’s my thing: have either of you given any thought to what’s going to happen to us in the unlikely event that we actually survive all this?”
“What do you mean?” Zdravkova asked.
“That would be a ‘no,’” I said, and she scowled even harder at me. “I heard you’re a lawyer, or at least used to be. We’re grabbing everything in the district which isn’t nailed down, confiscating supplies, ripping apart cars, demolishing buildings to close routes of approach, knocking new doors—”
“Actually, you’re doing most of those things,” she said.
“A distinction which will be lost on the authorities. My point is, what will the owners say when it’s all done? Have we got a legal leg to stand on? Or are we just a bunch of vandals and looters?”
“Legally we’re vandals and looters,” she said and shrugged. “If we live, we can worry about explaining it.”
“By then it will be too late. If we want outside help soon enough to make a difference, our legal status could be the deal breaker. But I got an idea. I know it goes against both of your better instincts, but hear me out on this one. Please.
“I think I’ve come up with an interesting angle.”
Chapter Nineteen
“So, Captain Prayzaat, we’re in a tough situation here,” I said once the two of us sat down across a small table in a back room. “Much as we’d like to give you and your men shelter and protection, we have no legal authority to resist the Army if they come for you.”
“The mutineers,” he said without any life in his voice. “Call them what they are.”
I had a cup of hot tea and the Varoki police captain had a mug of redroot soup. He’d made sure his three men had theirs before he would take any. That said something about him. I looked at him carefully. He slouched in his chair, worn down, and not just physically but emotionally as well. Even his ears drooped. I think he figured he’d come to the end of his road.
“Army, mutineers: they are whatever they are, and legally that’s going to be decided later, after the fighting is all over. What we call them now won’t change that.”
He looked away, fear and despair and anger all working over his face, sending weak flashes of color across his skin. “We protected you Humans from the mobs,” he said without looking at me. “I lost men fighting our own kind to protect your miserable lives. We killed Varoki.” He turned and looked me in the eye. “Do you understand? We killed our own people to protect you. If we had not done so, if we had just let them murder you all, I do not believe the Army would have acted against us.”
I figured he was right. Hell, I knew he was right, and it shamed me to sit there and drive a bargain for his and his men’s lives when they’d already paid such a heavy price for us. But theirs weren’t the only lives at stake, so I kept my face cold.
His face tightened with remembered pain and he looked away again. “I have no idea how many of my men the army killed, how many are being held, how many are still hiding somewhere out there. All I have left are those three patrolmen out there. My entire life has come down to keeping those three people alive, and you talk to me about legal technicalities.”
“Well, they won’t be technicalities when the Army comes for us and demands an accounting. But there may be a way.”
He turned and looked at me and for a moment his eyes flickered with hope, but then he remembered who he was talking to, and his lips pressed together in distaste.
“I will not break my oath,” he said. “I will not break the law. The law and the safety of three patrolmen, these things are the only meaning left to me. For all I know, I am the senior surviving officer of the Sakkatto Municipal Police not in rebel captivity. I will not finish my career, and probably my life, with an act of dishonor.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” I said. “Deputize us.”
He sat up, looked me in the eye, his own eyes suddenly wide with understanding. The anger and shame colors drained from his face and his ears fanned out wide. “Deputize you?” Then he smiled. “Of course! But you understand that would give me direct authority over your armed fighters.”
“Well, if you insist on being a hands-on commander, we may have a problem. See, I think you’re probably a hell of a cop, but this isn’t primarily a law enforcement issue.”
He drew back, suspicion replacing the optimism of a moment earlier in his eyes, but I pushed on.
“This is going to turn into a really tough fight, and it’s probably going to start any time now. We have a lot of folks here who have actually soldiered. Sometimes, like with me when I was a youngster, it was the Army or a few years in detention over something. Even for more honest Humans, the Army or mercenary gigs are fallback employment. It’s second nature for us, you know?”
He nodded reluctantly. Everyone knew about Humans and o
ur proclivity for violence—ferocious as tigers, but very useful tigers. It was just a stupid stereotype, but right now it might work in our favor.
“Besides,” I went on, “I have an idea how we can get communications out of Sakkatto City, even with the jamming. We can tell our story, and that includes your story.”
That got his attention. “How can you penetrate the jamming? The Army’s electronic assets are far more numerous and capable than those to which even we had access.”
“I don’t think we can penetrate their jamming, but there may be a way to get around it. But here’s the problem: if we start broadcasting your appeals to police in other cities to resist the coup, and to foreign powers to intervene against it, and we advertise the fact that you’re here with us, the Army is going to throw everything they have at us to shut you down, and we’ll just get plowed under.”
He leaned back and nodded. “You would not mention this problem unless you believed you had a solution to it as well.”
“Yeah, we dummy up an office and have you speak from it, claim it’s a remote site. What I’ve got in mind they won’t be able to trace very easily. So let them turn the city upside down. Who says you’re even in the city? We’ll transmit your messages straight to the e-nexus codes of police, public information sites, and some well-known feed heads outside of Sakkatto, and who knows where they’re originating?”
“Yes, that could work,” he admitted, “provided you can actually conjure your miracle with the jamming.”
“Yeah, but it also means you can’t be giving orders here, or even showing your face. This is going to get very scary, and there will be plenty of folks who lose heart. If they think they’ve got a juicy enough bit of information for the Army, they may try to use it to buy their lives, or the lives of their families.”
“You have a low opinion of your own species,” he said.
“No I don’t. You guys have stacked the deck against us, screwed us over for a hundred Earth years, given us the end of the stick that’s so shitty, sometimes the only win that’s possible is just staying alive. We were always survivors, but you made us absolute masters of the art. Next time you feel like clucking your tongue at someone about that, take a look in the mirror.”
Come the Revolution - eARC Page 14
