We stared at each other for a few seconds but eventually he nodded.
“Your rather insulting argument notwithstanding, the practicalities of the arrangement you propose are undeniable. I agree, provided you can actually arrange communication with the outside world. How will you accomplish that?”
I leaned forward and put my good elbow on the table. “Can you keep a secret?” I asked in a low voice.
He nodded.
“Good. So can I.”
* * *
Once the outlines of the deal were firmed up between Zdravkova, Katranjiev, and Captain Prayzaat of the Munies, I headed over to my first logistics staff meeting, a necessary preliminary to getting part two of my plan working.
The meeting was short because all five of my chiefs were anxious to get back to their work. That was encouraging. Each one turned in a resource list and outline plan, but in terms of accomplishments they were mostly still in the staff recruiting phase.
I went through their priority lists briefly and didn’t see anything crazy, so I approved them and told them to work on that basis for now and we’d fine-tune as we went along. I’d see what I could do about resources, but for the most part our philosophy would be to take what we needed, so long as we understood that our key goal—only goal, really—was to give the combatants what they needed to fight and give the noncombatants what they needed to stay alive. Nothing else mattered.
Dolores Wu (rations) and Petar Ivanov (fabrication) took off right away, and Dr. Mahajan asked Billy Conklin to stay after and talk about arrangements for an enlarged trauma ward. I buttonholed Moshe Greenwald outside the clinic where he’d stopped to roll a cigarette.
“Greenwald, wait a minute. You were an electrician on a starship, right? You know anything about hard-fiber communication and data transfer systems?”
He gave me a sour look. “Know anything? It’s my specialty. I ran power lines when I needed to, but that’s all brute force stuff. Data flow is art.”
“Okay, suppose somebody had a local hard-fiber comm/data system already up and running. How hard would it be to cut it into the city-wide network?”
He finished rolling the cigarette and then licked the paper before answering. “Impossible,” he said.
Damn. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but figured I may as well get all the bad news at once.
“Okay, how come?”
“Encryption,” he said and then lit his cigarette with a pocket lighter, drew in and exhaled. “The municipal and national data pipes are encrypted five ways to Sunday, and nobody can hack into that stuff from the outside except in bad adventure holovids. If someone slipped you the security code we could do it, but otherwise you’ll never be able to read their feed.”
“No, I’m not talking about reading their transmissions,” I said. “I’m talking about piggy-backing onto their fiber network and sending ours.”
Moshe shrugged. “Oh. Well that’s easy. I mean, it’s illegal as hell, but these days what ain’t? The utility tunnel with the main data pipe from e-Kruaan-Arc to the capital nexus at Katammu-Arc runs right under Sookagrad.” Then he thought for a moment and his eyes got wider. “Hey, that’s some idea, Boss! We can get word out about what’s going on here. I’m not sure what good it will do us, but if the Army’s jamming the comms, it must be for a reason, right? Of course, you know that once broadcasts from Sookagrad start showing up, it could motivate the Army to wipe us out.”
“Walk with me. We have to talk to Stal. He’s the one with the fiber network we may need to borrow. And I think I have a way around the reprisal thing.”
We started walking toward the dry goods store that had Stal’s office on the second floor.
“So you crewed on a starship, huh? Why’d you stop?”
He spat out a piece of loose tobacco before answering. “Economy got shitty and the carrier I was crewing for cut back. I ended up on the beach for a year and a half, stuck here. Then a week ago I got an offer. In-system shuttle, back and forth to the gas giant, but better than nothing right? All set to ship out when all this crap hit.” He spat again. “Talk about pissed off.”
“Yeah, I bet. You know any physics?”
“Bissel,” Moshe answered. “You know how it is. You work engineering on a starship, you pick some up. You have to or you don’t get any of the jokes.”
He assured me there were actually a lot of physics jokes, and so I asked him to tell me one. He said I wouldn’t get it but I wanted to hear one anyway. He thought for a moment and then nodded.
“Okay, here goes. Heisenberg is driving down the highway and a Munie pulls him over. Munie walks up to the side of his ground car and says, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ Heisenberg says, ‘No, but I know where I am!’”
Moshe stared at me and grinned. When I didn’t laugh he said, “I told you so.”
“So explain it to me.”
He shook his head. “Nah, it’s stupid to explain a joke. Either you get it when it’s told or you don’t. If I explain it, it still won’t be funny.”
I started to argue when we heard the sound of automatic weapon fire. We both stopped and listened, and so did everyone else on the street. The sound came from the north, out on our perimeter, but the intervening buildings made it sound far away and harmless, at least to us.
Moshe dropped his cigarette and ground it out. “So it begins, nu?”
I looked around at everyone frozen on the street, their faces made ugly by fear. The hardest thing to get used to in Sookagrad was the unbroken sea of Human faces. Everywhere else we were the exception. We had a reputation for playing poorly by other people’s rules. I started wondering how well we could play by our own, how this experiment in cooperative effort was going to work.
I took a deep breath and shouted to everyone who could hear me. “Okay, it’s gunfire. Get used to it. It’ll get a lot louder soon enough. Anyone with a job to do, get back to it. Anyone without a job, find one.”
We started walking again and then everyone did. The firing stuttered, paused, started again, and then faded out. Someone had probably gotten trigger-happy. If there had been a serious push on the perimeter, a few bursts of automatic fire wouldn’t have been enough to turn it away.
I realized I didn’t know beans about where the defensive perimeter was, and I’d need to if I was going to push ammo forward. It might be a better idea to set up ammo resupply points and have the fighting groups on the perimeter send ammo runners back. I’d still need to know the main concentrations, and what they were armed with. Ivanov might be a software wiz and the right guy to honcho ammunition production, but I had a feeling I was going to have to get personally involved in distribution.
Upstairs from the store, Stal’s admin assistant buzzed us into his office. Stal sat behind his desk looking at the smart wall panorama of the northern approaches, smoking another one of my imported cigars. I could smell the cigar: the rich tobacco and just a hint of spice, the scent of the Caribbean. He better be enjoying it.
I glanced at the smart wall. There was a burning ground car down there in a broad street which ran under the maglev tracks high above. A dozen people poked around it—Humans, so they were our guys.
It occurred to me that smart walls in some half-assed poured foamstone building in the middle of all this squalor seemed as out of place as a crystal chandelier in a chemical toilet stall. Speaking of which, I needed to get Billy Conklin to work on setting up a bunch more chemical toilets, and quick.
“Enjoying the cigar?” I asked.
He looked at the ash on the end and smiled. “Da,” he said slowly. “Kuba Maduro? Always wanted know how Cuban cigar taste.”
I decided not to tell him they were from Nicaragua. If you need something from someone, don’t start by spilling his soup.
He looked as if he’d been deep in a thought trance and was coming out of it slowly. He turned to face us and frowned. “Who this guy?” he asked, pointing his cigar at Moshe.
“Greenwald, my head of
power, and an electrical genius. I got an idea.”
“Da? As good as letting four Munie fugitives hang around in exchange for toy badges?”
So he must already have heard about that deal. Given his line of work I could understand his ambivalence. Well, I was going to have to tell him about it anyway for this whole thing to make sense.
“It’s related to the Munies. In fact, it’s essential, so if you want to scotch the Munie deal, say no to this, and the whole package goes out the window.”
I stopped and felt myself shiver involuntarily. The expression “out the window” suddenly had more significance for me than it used to and I didn’t think I’d be using it as much.
“Those Munies aren’t anything but a liability,” I continued, “unless we have the ability to communicate to the outside world.”
“Da,” he agreed. “And?”
“Earlier I noticed you’ve got a hard-fiber comm/data network. I got an idea how we can use it to get around the jamming.”
He sat for a moment thinking. “Is why electrical genius is here?” he said, nodding at Moshe. He said “genius” the way you’d call someone a “smart guy” and not mean it as a compliment.
I just nodded.
He looked back at the smart wall, at the Humans down around the burning ground car, looking like bugs from this distance. He took a long drag on the cigar and blew a slow funnel of smoke toward the wall, watched it curl and rise toward the ceiling, just like the thicker, blacker smoke from the ground car curled up around the maglev tracks above it.
It wasn’t tough to figure what he was thinking. We could play armadillo: curl up, lay low and do the absolute minimum to stay alive, make the fewest enemies possible, and hope things just blew over, got back to normal. Then we could all go about our business same as before.
Or we could play tiger, make something happen to save ourselves, even if that made us a bigger target.
One plan required faith in things just running down of their own accord; the other required faith in the active agency of people and institutions outside of Sakkatto City which had never gone to bat for Humans before. Tough call, and I wasn’t positive my idea was the best way to go.
He turned back to us and sighed. “Okay. Explain plan.”
Chapter Twenty
“People of Bakaa and the entire Cottohazz: I am Captain Arkerro Prayzaat, acting commandant of the Sakkatto Municipal Police. I am communicating from a secret and secure police facility. To the best of my knowledge I am the highest ranking police official who has not been taken into custody or executed by the Army mutineers who violently seized control of the government two days ago.”
Prayzaat sat behind a desk backed by a smart wall which was programmed to show a detailed map of the city. We’d put a bunch of arcane and important-looking symbols on it: geometric shapes in different colors and with a four-digit number below each of them. They were randomly placed and didn’t actually mean anything. Hopefully a bunch of Army intelligence officers would spend a few sleepless nights trying to decode them, rather than working on something important.
“The mutineers have told the Cottohazz they have restored order in Sakkatto City,” Prayzaat continued. “There is no order in the city. Aside from a few small areas in some of the arcologies there is only violence and anarchy.
“Hundreds of police officers have been executed by the mutineers and almost all of the survivors of the force have been arrested and are being held at secret locations. Their so-called crime was to use force to protect the lives of non-uBakai citizens of the Cottohazz against rampaging mobs. I call on the mutineers to disclose the location and identity of all police in their custody and release them to neutral parties immediately.
“Sakkatto City has been denuded of police and plunged into chaos. The citizen associations of Sakkatto must step into the breach and establish order in their own neighborhoods. To that end, and under my authority as commandant of the Sakkatto Municipal Police, I hereby officially deputize all members of the citizen associations whose names follow this address, and I empower them not only to take all steps necessary to protect the lives and property of their people, but also to resist the illegal gang of thugs who have overthrown our rightful government.
“We face a daunting task, but I call upon all loyal citizens of the Commonwealth of Bakaa to band together and forget whatever differences divided us before. What we fight for now is nothing less than the rule of law. I also call upon the Cottohazz itself to recall the pluralistic principles upon which it is based and to aid us in our struggle. This military coup cannot succeed unless the Cottohazz so allows it. If you will not stand against this shameful act, what will you stand for?”
“That’s a wrap,” the video tech said after two or three seconds of silence. The seven others of us in the room, who stood outside the arc of the holovid recorder, started moving and talking again. The list of community groups, which we’d culled from the comm lists of Katranjiev’s office, included a lot of Varoki groups as well as some of the ethnic community associations. It would scroll on the vid after Prayzaat finished, probably over a frozen ghosted image of him at his desk. That was up to the editor. The citizen groups were listed alphabetically so the Sookagrad Citizens’ League was well down the list, nice and inconspicuous—but it was still official.
As calls to arms go, I thought it was okay but nothing special: a bit wordy and long-winded, but that’s what a lot of the Varoki are like. I figured it was more important that the speech sound sincere than eloquent, and it did. Those were Prayzaat’s words, and he meant them.
The three members of the troika—Katranjiev, Zdravkova, and Stal—clustered around Prayzaat to shake his hand and work out our next move. I slipped out the door and headed toward the clinic, my temporary headquarters. I figured I was going to have to move somewhere else soon, probably into one of the ammo fabrication sites. The clinic was starting to get busy, and things were only going to get crazier there. I already felt like my admin folks were in the way.
I blinked as I came out the basement freight door into the darkness of the empty street, irregularly lit by distant fires and an occasional aerial flare. I heard a lot more small arms fire now, all over the city, but not much near us for the moment. From far off in the distance came the muffled thud of an explosion. So much for the Army restoring order.
In the last twenty-four hours the Varoki gangs had tested our perimeter in three places, tried to bluff or bully their way past the barricades, but so far the fighters had stood their ground and driven them off with a lot of noise but not many casualties. At some point soon that was all going to change, one way or another, and then we’d see.
Someone walked down the narrow street a dozen yards ahead of me, a woman, keeping close by the buildings to her right. People were already learning to stay out of the center of the street, where stray rounds were more likely to fall. Rain earlier had left the pavement wet and shining in the occasional flicker of light, but the clouds were clearing I thought. Maybe we’d have some sunshine tomorrow. I wondered what the weather was like at The’On’s place over in uKootrin territory. I wondered if they’d gotten rain, if Marr would feel sunshine on her face tomorrow. I wondered what she was thinking.
At least she knew I was alive. Once Greenwald spliced into the uBakai national data pipe, I’d been able to flash a single message to The’On’s residence there: “I am alive. Sasha.” No indication of where I was, of course, and no way for them to comm back—too dangerous to everyone else here if anyone figured out where I was in Sakkatto City.
I leaned against the street corner and yawned. I hadn’t slept in about two days, near as I could remember, but I’d gone a lot longer than that without sleep before. Of course, I’d been younger then, and the last two days I’d been on my feet almost the whole time. Too much standing around on foamstone pavement was starting to get to me in the joints, especially my knees. I ought to get a little rest, but first I had to get the ammo distribution points reorganized.
Ivanov had placed them where his ammo carriers could get to them, but too far from the perimeter. He was doing fine with fabrication so I let him concentrate on that and I took over ammo distribution myself until I could find some eager beaver to delegate it to. I’d half figured I’d have to step in there anyway so it wasn’t a big surprise. Better to get it squared away now than try to shift everything around when the fighting got heavy.
And I needed to get the soup kitchen better organized, with some volunteers to haul hot chow up close to the fighting line. And we still didn’t have enough dormitory space for the Sookagrad folks who’d been displaced, let alone for the Human refugees we’d been getting, a trickle at first but more in the last twelve hours.
And I had to convince the perimeter fighters to get a lot more serious about recovering and taking care of the spent magazines from their weapons. Almost every weapon we had was a gauss rifle or pistol of one sort or another. The gauss in their name meant they magnetically accelerated a composite metallic flechette faster than the speed of sound, but they needed electricity to do it. The batteries that provided the juice for the system were embedded in the magazines. We could fabricate all the flechettes in the world but if we didn’t have magazines to load them into, and recharge with power, we were out of business.
Where to start?
Ammunition distribution. Right. Make the pitch to the perimeter fighters about magazine recovery when I go around with word on the new ammo points. They’d like not having to go as far to get it, so they’d be more disposed to help us on the other thing. I stretched my left arm over my head, twisted from side to side to loosen up my back, and headed on to the clinic. Maybe Doc Mahajan could give me a shot or something for the joint pain.
Come the Revolution - eARC Page 15
