Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  It wasn’t the smoky hell of a pre-Diaspora industrial slum, and the poverty wasn’t as bad as it was on many Verge worlds. There were even a few parks, zoos and museums scattered about. But the most striking aspect of the seccy ghetto, to Thandi, was the apparent absence of law. More precisely, the absence of official authority. That had not been true on Ndebele. Granted, the law had been corrupt and often brutal. But it had still been present.

  Here . . .

  True enough, the technical features seemed to be under official control—such things as traffic governors and boundaries, which were readily visible, and she presumed such things as waste disposal and power distribution, which were not. Those were the sort of things that had to be regulated or chaos would result and would inevitably spread to the citizen areas.

  But beyond such matters, Mesa’s powers-that-be didn’t seem to care much how the seccies regulated their own affairs. After she’d left Zilwicki’s ship with the load she was carrying and passed through the starport’s entry and customs gate, she’d seen only one police vehicle—and that had been within the first kilometer of travel. Shortly thereafter she’d entered the seccy districts and from that time since, so far as she could tell, there was no police presence at all.

  On Ndebele, in contrast, police had been visible everywhere. Granted, the term “police” was something of a misnomer since they’d behaved much more like an occupying army. They often ignored crimes committed against the poor and powerless—and when they didn’t, invariably responded slowly—but they were nonetheless an ever-present reality.

  Here . . . nothing. Thandi felt something almost like relief as she headed down the access ramp into the labyrinth of underground service ways and away from the aerial traffic lanes between the dreary canyons of seccy residential towers.

  She knew what she was encountering, because Victor had described it to her. She now realized, though, that on some level she simply hadn’t believed him. After all, how can you run a huge city without law enforcement? This side of the pearly gates of heaven, at least, that was simply impossible.

  Of course, there was law enforcement—it just wasn’t the formal law, and the enforcers were more or less self-appointed. When it came to this issue, at least, the seccy quarters of Mesa were as close as humanity had ever gotten to untrammeled libertarianism. And if that state of affairs was impossible to distinguish from one in which crime lords ran the show, so much the worse for libertarianism.

  Being fair—so Victor had told her, anyway—in some of the seccy districts the crime bosses probably did a better job of maintaining order and dispensing justice than the authorities would. Certainly Mesan authorities. Disorder and dissatisfaction were bad for business, after all, including illegal businesses. And the cut that the crime bosses took from every legitimate business was probably no worse than taxes would have been.

  More than legal scholars liked to admit, the concept of a protection racket was often hard to distinguish on the ground floor from what people got from legal authorities. To a crime boss, you turned over a portion of the proceeds of your business or profession and in return you got protection, stability, stable supplies and prices—even, in the best run areas, a measure of social welfare. To a legitimate government, you turned over a portion of the proceeds of your business and profession and in return you got . . .

  About the same results. Superior results, to be sure, in well-run societies like Beowulf and Manticore—even much superior ones. But in many of the Verge worlds—certainly on Thandi’s native Mfecane planets—most people would have been better off with a well-run crime syndicate in charge than the “legitimate” thugs and thieves they actually got.

  The deeper and ultimately insoluble problem was that even in the best-run seccy quarters, the people who really ran things had no formally recognized claim to that position.

  “Authority” was a term that the human race had seen abused more times than anyone could remember, but it was still not just a name. The term meant legitimate power, not just power as such. And what defined legitimacy was that the power so held was formally recognized and accepted by everyone as rightfully obtained and established.

  There was no such formal legitimacy in the seccy quarters, not even the best-run ones. True, there was an approximation. Each district had what amounted to an informal council of the crime bosses, overseen by the most powerful of them. In Neue Rostock, that top boss was Jurgen Dusek. All of the major crime bosses maintained contact with each other through yet another informal council. Membership in that council was tantamount to being recognized as one of the top circle.

  The council preferred to keep conflicts under control and as a rule, managed to do so. But should one of the great crime lords die or simply lose their grip, with no clear line of succession, struggle and conflict invariably erupted. And not struggle waged by established legal norms kept within tightly defined boundaries, either. What usually resulted was warfare. Sometimes under the surface, sometimes out in the open. Sometimes resolved by a few killings, sometimes by slaughter. Sometimes of short duration, sometimes seeming to be endless.

  If Neue Rostock embodied one extreme, Lower Radomsko embodied the other. Half a century earlier, the crime boss who’d controlled the district had been assassinated by a rival, who’d in turn been assassinated within two hours by another rival, who’d then been assassinated less than a day later by yet another rival—who’d died herself the next day from wounds incurred in the fighting.

  Thereafter, the district had dissolved into anarchy, from which it had still not recovered. The neighboring bosses didn’t like the chaos, but they preferred it to the risk of letting another boss gain even more influence and power in the region. Lower Radomsko was a byword in Mesa’s seccy areas for what happened if you didn’t have a capable and tough boss running the show. The district remained the most violent area on Mesa—and the poorest.

  * * *

  She was now in the lowest traffic lane in a commercial thoroughfare, as she’d been since she descended the access ramp. Subterranean commercial thoroughfares were normal in cities the size of Mendel. The population density that resulted from modern urban construction, with its emphasis on counter-grav-supported towers, had many advantages from an economic and ecological standpoint. But it did pose huge challenges for traffic. One of the standard measures was to assign commercial traffic to special underground avenues and only allow them to join above-ground air traffic when they were ready to make a delivery—and, as much as possible, to situate the delivery entrances below the surface as well.

  The thoroughfare she was in had four vertical lanes and she was in the bottom one. Another lorry suddenly emerged from an intersecting feeder lane and turned sharply, going into a sudden descent right above her. Her lorry’s computer program reacted by doing an emergency landing and coming to a stop, just centimeters above the ground surface.

  “Bastards,” she muttered. The pejorative wasn’t aimed at the other driver so much as it was at the people responsible for the situation in general. Normally, traffic control programs would have automatically prevented such an occurrence by changing the velocities or lane levels of the two vehicles as needed. She’d already noticed, however, that the control programs had seemed a little ragged for the past half-kilometer or so.

  Another lorry came out of the same feeder lane, swerved into the lane set aside for traffic going the other way—luckily there was no one there—and then cut directly across in front of her. The lorry came to a stop, also at ground level, forming the crossbar of a T with Thandi’s.

  She glanced at the rearview screen. Not to her surprise, a third lorry had come up from behind and blocked her from going backward.

  She didn’t bother checking the sides of her vehicle. She was too close to the wall on her right and the vehicles ahead and behind were so close that she didn’t have room to maneuver the lorry around them to the left. Instead—perhaps belatedly—she checked her position on the location screen. It took a moment to interp
ret what she was seeing, since the locator program didn’t recognize or use the unofficial names for Mendel’s seccy quarters.

  Sure enough. She’d entered Lower Radomsko. Just a corner of it, which the traffic program would have taken her through in a couple of minutes. But that had been enough, it seemed.

  Most likely, someone in traffic control had been bribed to steer her this way. Thandi’s air lorry had been bought, not rented or leased, but in the short time since they’d arrived on Mesa she hadn’t had time to fix a logo to the vehicle. She had the logo ready to be applied, even—“Komlanc Intermodal Transport, Ltd.”—but it was sitting in the cargo hold along with the goods she was hauling to Steph Turner’s boutique-to-be.

  The absence of identification on the lorry probably didn’t matter, though. A quick check, which anyone working in traffic control could have been able to do, would have turned up the fact that Komlanc Intermodal wasn’t a registered freight hauler. It was a so-called “gypsy outfit”—very common in Mesa’s seccy areas, but without any sort of official legitimacy. Or, more to the point, official sanction and protection.

  In most seccy districts, that wouldn’t have been a problem. The “worst” that would happen was that representatives of a local crime boss would have shown up soon enough and arrangements would have been made in a reasonably amicable manner. Bribes going one way; informal sanction and protection the other—which was exactly what Victor had figured on doing anyway. He’d been planning all along to infiltrate himself into the seccy areas by using the existing criminal networks.

  But this was Lower Radomsko, not one of the well-run districts like Neue Rostock or Ayacucho. Someone was just planning to hijack the lorry. And, most likely, kill her in the process.

  People were starting to emerge from the vehicles ahead of and behind her. Two men from the front vehicle; a man and a woman from the rear one. All of them except the woman were armed with pistols. She was carrying a small packet that probably contained explosives.

  “You stupid bastards,” she muttered, then keyed a signal on her com.

  * * *

  Victor was four blocks away and five levels up when he got the signal. He immediately pushed the button that instructed his special program to turn control of the vehicle over to him. More precisely, that allowed him to take control of the vehicle without that fact being broadcast to a traffic control center. The air car slipped out of the level he was in, went down to the uppermost of the commercial levels and headed toward Thandi’s location just behind a lorry.

  Unless the lorry driver was completely inattentive he’d spot Victor in his rear viewer. With a commercial vehicle under automatic control, it was possible he wouldn’t be paying attention, but that wasn’t something to be counted on. It wouldn’t matter anyway since Victor would be leaving his vicinity in another block and a half. The odds that a lorry driver in this area—he was almost certainly a seccy himself—would report a fleeting traffic violation to the police when he wasn’t personally affected were almost nil.

  The real risk was that the program that controlled traffic in the area would immediately spot the violation—two violations; in fact: entering a commercial lane with a private vehicle and taking personal control of the vehicle in an area designated for automatic traffic—and alert the authorities. But the program Victor had used to override the automatic controls had been designed by Anton, whose cybernetic skills vastly exceeded those of whoever designed the traffic program. It would fool the traffic controller into thinking Victor was still under automatic guidance. For all practical purposes, Victor had simply vanished from the grid—except the grid thought he was still there.

  Anton had also given them all scrambling programs for their coms which would shield their conversations from any but the most high-powered decryption efforts. Such efforts could only be done by Mesan security agencies and would only be done if they were directly suspicious—in which case, they’d almost certainly be doomed anyway so there was no point worrying about it.

  Thandi gave him a quick sketch of the situation. “Biggest problem is with the lorry overhead,” she concluded. “There’s no movement from there at all.”

  “I’ll handle that,” Victor said. “You just deal with the ones coming at you. Speaking of which, survivors would be handy.”

  “Yana was right. You’re no fun at all.”

  * * *

  Yana entered the central chamber of the Brixton’s Comet. The chamber had an official title which she didn’t remember. She just called it “the salon.”

  Anton called it “Xanadu.” When she asked, he’d refused to explain what the term meant on the grounds that it would be too embarrassing. But she didn’t believe him. Zilwicki was about as prone to embarrassment as a lava flow.

  Anton was where he almost always was when awake—at the computer terminal he’d set up in a corner of the salon. Using the term “corner” loosely, since the chamber bore only a vague resemblance to anything rectilinear. So far as Yana could tell, the Brixton’s Comet had been designed by a lunatic. She could only hope the ship’s engines and controls were more coherent than its interior and furnishings.

  She crossed the salon and went into the chamber which Anton had set aside as her living quarters. He called that chamber “Shangri-La.” A term which he also refused to explain on the same spurious grounds.

  The bed in that chamber could have been used as the playing field for at least four sports that Yana was familiar with, except the footing would have been too treacherous for any of those sports except the most ancient one.

  She came back out of the chamber, planted her hands on her hips—which were now way too ample, in her opinion, albeit not as grotesque as her bosom—and gave Anton a disgusted look.

  “You’re not going to be any more fun than Victor was, are you?”

  Chapter 30

  The man who seemed to be leading the four robbers was now close to the cab of the lorry. “In there!” he shouted. “Open up!” To give emphasis to the demand, he brandished the pistol in his hand as if it were a sword. What did he think that would accomplish?

  For that matter, what did he think the pistol itself would accomplish? A military grade pulse rifle would certainly be able to fire projectiles into the cab. So would the most powerful sidearms, at least if the shots struck squarely. But the piece of crap he was wielding? It had no chance at all of doing so. This was a relatively modern cargo lorry she was driving, designed and built for heavy work, not a flimsy and lightly designed personal sport vehicle.

  It was presumably because they understood that much that the female robber was carrying a sack with her. Thandi was pretty sure that sack held explosives of some kind with which they could breach the cab door. She could hole up in the cab for a bit, but not more than a minute. Less, if the female robber was proficient with explosives.

  “I need a timetable,” she said into the com.

  “Give me ten more seconds, if you can. If not, try for five.”

  Victor was without a doubt the most nerveless person Thandi had ever met. In times of stress, his demeanor was calm; his expression, impassive; his voice, level; even his pulse remained steady. Still he was human, not a robot. It was a sign of Victor’s tension that he’d answered her in complete sentences instead of a few words. By the time he was done, three seconds had already passed. She figured it had taken her another three seconds to contemplate the matter.

  One one thousand.

  Two one thousand.

  The lead robber pounded on the cab’s door with the butt of his pistol. “Open up, goddam you!”

  Prisoners be damned. Stupidity that profound carried the death penalty.

  Time.

  She unlatched the door and slammed it outward, using all her strength and what mass she could bring to bear while still seated. Her tremendous strength hadn’t been affected at all by the body nanotech transformation and while the few extra kilos that had been added might slow her down a bit—though not much—they also added a li
ttle mass to the equation.

  The edge of the door caught the robber in the middle of his face. The impact crushed his nose, shattered his jaw, knocked out most of his teeth, broke his skull and neck in the doing and sent his body flying for several meters. The corpse almost completed a back flip before it hit the surface of the street.

  One of the robbers started firing almost at once. Thandi was impressed by his alertness and readiness.

  His marksmanship, on the other hand, was execrable. All the darts sailed way too high, some of them not hitting the cab at all. Even the ones that did would have gone over Thandi’s head.

  If she’d been dumb enough to leave her head there in the first place, which of course she didn’t. As soon as she felt the impact of the door on the robber she’d thrown herself out of the cab.

  Out—and down. Essentially, except for the fact that her motions were controlled, she fell almost two meters.

  But everything was controlled. She immediately rolled under her lorry when she hit the surface—there was just enough clearance—came to a prone firing position and started shooting with her pistol. Which was military grade, thank you very much.

  Her marksmanship was . . .

  Almost perfect. Not quite, though, because she fired as soon as the first target came to bear rather than waiting an extra split-second to aim more carefully. So, her first double-tapped shots went wild.

  But that was only by Thandi Palane’s values of “wild shots,” which most people would have considered ridiculous. Instead of destroying the target’s kneecap, the pulser darts severed the anterior tibial artery and shattered the upper fibula. The robber screeched, his lower leg was instantly soaked in blood, his pistol went flying and he collapsed.

  That didn’t stop Thandi from cursing herself. But it also didn’t stop her from taking down the other two robbers. Both with knee shots. Perfect knee shots.