Blood Binds the Pack

by Alex Wells

  “I’m sure she didn’t. What you got?” Clarence asked.

  Rosa dug a handful of something out of her pocket and deposited it into Clarence’s palm.

  “What the hell are these?” Clarence stirred the little bits of plastic with one finger. He glanced up at Rosa. “This some kind of play money for your girls?”

  Mag leaned over to look herself, and picked up one of the chits. They were almost the same shape as the denominations of credit markers she knew, but the colors were wrong and the plastic felt too light. She turned the chit over and frowned at the TransRift logo raised a bit unevenly on its surface rather than the normal FUS logo.

  “Payman on the site said it’s company money,” Rosa said. “In numbers, it’s twice as much as we were promised for bein’ on the wildcat crew…”

  “But what the hell is company money?” Clarence finished.

  “Payman said we could use it regular at all the stores, so it’s more valuable ’cause we’re gettin’ more and the prices ain’t changed. And they’d be happy to buy up our credits for twice their value.”

  Of course they would, Mag thought grimly. She already saw where this was leading. Greenbellies and bluebellies didn’t deign to buy anything from the company store. They had all their stuff brought in on the supply trains. “They say you could buy a ticket off world with company money?” Mag asked.

  Rosa’s gaze flicked to her. “Said we could. And we could use it to send money off planet still too, one for one.” Her expression was dark. “Got only their word for that.”

  Because of course, few people heard much from their families, once they got to Tanegawa’s World. The only things that ever made it through were old-fashioned letters written on flimsies. People often got data cards they had no way of viewing. It was an act of faith, trying to send anything off on the rift ship.

  “Y’all just take it quiet?” Odalia asked.

  Rosa’s lip curled. “Payman said that’s all he had. So it was that or nothin’. One of the boys they brought in from Primero, he tried to stir things up. Cussed ’em out good. They took his pay envelope back, then took him when he threw a punch, and we ain’t seen him since. Another one, he got his nose broke.” She shrugged. “I got babies waitin’ for me and needin’ to be fed.”

  “How much diggin’ you do?” Mag asked.

  “One shaft, five hundred meters. Didn’t hit nothin’ but a trace here and there of that blue dust. They were excited about that for a hot minute, but got real quiet after when even the dust went out. Then they did a survey at the end of the shaft and said it weren’t worth goin’ further.” She rubbed the back of her hand over her nose. “That blue stuff ain’t showin’ right on their surveys, I’m thinkin’.”

  Mag didn’t like the sound of that. It meant the company was flailing in the dark, hoping to hit on something. That was dangerous for the people doing the work. And now the bonus pay wouldn’t even go for any kind of good use.

  Clarence nodded, and offered her the chits back. “You go see your kids, Rosa. Give ’em a hug for me.”

  The air in Clarence’s kitchen felt thick and close as Rosa closed the door behind her. No one seemed to want to speak, though Mag wasn’t certain why. Maybe because this was an unexpected tactic from the company. They were used to threats of blacklisting, and bullying by the greenbellies. From a certain angle, this looked almost reasonable, which was why she distrusted it profoundly.

  She’d been trying to keep her head down more than usual, with how Odalia had reacted to her before. Quiet and efficient, rebuilding the trust seemed the way to go. But fine, she could start this. “This is gonna make it damn near impossible to pay off anyone from the company.”

  “I know,” Clarence said.

  “They been asking too much anyway,” Odalia said.

  “If we want guns and… anythin’ else we can’t get in the company store, we need to be able to do that,” Mag pointed out. They’d been building up their stock slowly out of necessity, since they had to buy scrapped or broken guns and fix them. This was going to stop even that in its tracks.

  “There’s gonna be plenty of people like Rosa, who don’t like it but can do the math,” Odalia said.

  “Gonna be others ready to fight,” Clarence said. He rubbed his face with one hand. “Just had payday. That gives us, what… twelve days?”

  “Yeah,” Odalia said. “And we don’t know for certain the towns are going to get that… that play money.”

  “And we don’t know for certain we aren’t,” Mag said quietly. “So we get out the word. And… we tell people we need all the regular credits they got. I’ll keep tight records. We can reimburse ’em with the company money one for one, and return the credits later if we don’t end up needin’ ’em.”

  “More’n that,” Clarence said. “We ask the workers in all the towns if–” He raised his voice over Odalia’s protest “–if that’s what we get in our pay envelopes, what do we want to do about it. Because whatever it is, we all do it together. They been beatin’ us and killin’ us with accidents, and now they ain’t even gonna pay us proper. There’s gotta be a line, and I think we come to it.”

  Mag could have kissed him for voicing what was on her own mind. Though she felt a shiver of doubt, because that had been almost exactly what she was thinking. Did they just agree, or had she somehow unwittingly made him agree with her? No, she couldn’t go down that path, not without making herself crazy. “Knowin’ we got some action we’re workin’ toward will keep the hotheads at a low simmer,” she offered.

  “We gonna be ready in twelve days?” Odalia asked darkly.

  Both she and Clarence looked dead-on at Mag. She hadn’t realized until that moment that Odalia had been avoiding looking at her. How did that make her feel so small, so uncertain? Because she was small and uncertain, and she knew that there was a lot riding on this. They’d worked so hard to keep everyone restrained because she’d claimed they needed time, so that they even could get ready. “In twelve days, we’ll be ready as we can be.” She kept her voice steady and firm, somehow. Like she really believed it.

  Clarence nodded. “I’ll draft a note callin’ for a vote on this. Not just the majority in a town, but the majority of the towns. That’s the only way this is gonna work. And we gotta give people some time to chew it over, so… I’ll ask for the vote back by ten days. Then we’ll know which way we’re jumpin’.”

  Ten days wasn’t a long time, Mag knew. And ten days was also more than a lifetime. She’d lived it both ways. She set her shoulders, holding the determination that in ten days, she’d be ready. No matter which way it went.

  “This one’s from the Chadha family.”

  Mag saw the envelope, which was really a grimy, folded-up flimsy, out of the corner of her eye, and took it. She popped the flap and did a quick count of the chits inside, then noted down the amount in her little book. “Got it.”

  “We had a bit of our water ration too, and I added that to the barrel.”

  Finally, she looked up. The man in front of her, Omar, was large, with a saturnine complexion and a face that seemed meant to be mysterious and brooding. His shaggy black hair hung around his brown eyes; his mine-pale brown skin pocked with black rock dust. He gave her an eager smile, revealing a chipped front tooth. “How much?” Mag asked.

  “Dunno. About a third of a liter?”

  Mag swallowed down her annoyance. With the break point coming, she needed the numbers precise, so they could figure out how to ration, and know how long they could hold on. Every drop of water, their most precious resource, needed to be accounted for. “I need a more exact amount than that.”

  “Sorry,” Omar said, and he did sound sorry at least. Everything the man did was painfully earnest, to the point that Mag sometimes found herself wondering if it was an elaborate act.

  “Next time, measure it,” Mag said. “This is important.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Omar made no move to leave, so she asked, “Something el
se?”

  “Also found this at the message box, out in the gulch? No name or nothin’ on it, but… Guess it might be somethin’?” He handed over a crumpled flimsy folded into its own envelope.

  Mag untangled the flimsy and smoothed it out, instantly recognizing the awkwardly formed letters: bandits from the company robbing yall of credits bagging to send back to newcastle and farmer told me company been tellin them to not help you

  Punctuation. Some day she’d sit Hob Ravani down and make her go over her punctuation.

  From one angle, she supposed the information about the credits was almost… not good news, exactly, but useful. If she handed word of this around, more miners would be willing to add their credits to the fund in exchange for the company money, since better that than having them stolen the next time one of them got out to visit another town or was sent on a wildcat crew. And that seemed to be more and more common these days, people in and out of the mine for a few days at a stretch, only a skeleton crew actually working the veins they had. She wondered how much longer it would be until they’d pulled everyone out. Maybe they just hadn’t found enough test sites yet.

  But it was also bad, really damn bad. TransRift knew what they’d been doing, and this confirmed it. They knew the miners had been putting in bribes, and were cutting that off. Clarence’s two crooked greenbellies in the armory had disappeared. Another, in Tercio, had laughed at the handful of company money one of the miners there tried, saying, “You can’t get real bullets with fake money.” The farmers had already wanted to ignore them, and this made it worse.

  “Did I do right to bring that to you?” Omar asked.

  “Yes,” Mag said, and tucked it away in her skirt. “You see somethin’ like that again, it’s from the Ravani. Should come straight to me.”

  Omar’s face lit up. “So we gonna be hirin’ the Ghost Wolves again, with all this money?” While TransRift had been claiming to anyone who’d listen that the Weatherman had died in a tragic train derailment accident – while at the same time raising the price on Hob’s head like it was completely unrelated – the story had spread. The Wolves were on their way to being folk heroes whether Hob liked it or not. The kids and people Mag’s age – though hell, she felt so much older these days – ate it up. Most of them seemed to have dreams of impressing Hob somehow, joining her crew. Mag didn’t have the heart to tell them that Hob wasn’t easy to impress, even if she had wanted to admit how well they knew each other.

  Mag was fairly certain, though, that Hob really did like it, in her secret heart that beat thick with rebellion. Uncle Nick, on the other hand, was probably turning over in his grave. “I hear they got other matters on their plate.”

  The money probably would go to Hob, eventually. But she was keeping that under her hat for now. It was a strange sort of push and pull, between needing to keep all the workers together and make sure they were all on board, while not saying too much because there were company spies everywhere.

  “I figure so. But… you know ’em, right? Do you think I could ever meet ’em?” he asked.

  Which brought her back to Omar’s bright, inquisitive brown eyes. Maybe that was hero worship shining out of them. Maybe it was an intelligence a lot more malevolent. She could feel him, right in front of her, like his mind was a tangible thing, his thoughts a pressure against her skin. It would be easy, very easy, to just empty him out of everything he knew – if he did know anything.

  Mag swallowed down that urge. She didn’t want to become what Odalia already assumed she was. “You got more errands to run,” she said. “Scat.”

  She turned her attention back to the numbers until they swam in front of her eyes; really, she shouldn’t have bothered until Anabi got home. While Mag had a good head for math, Anabi was even better when it came to keeping inventories organized.

  The sound of the kitchen door and a breath of cool night air heralded Anabi’s return. She smiled brightly and slid around a chair to sit next to Mag, hooking their legs together. She twitched the notebook out of Mag’s grasp and wrote a quick sentence in the margin: Next time I’ll keep the books and you go to the warehouse.

  Mag had sent her to watch the miners trying to train, knowing they’d have a real fight on their hands eventually. “That bad?”

  This time, Anabi did fish her slate out of her pocket. Worse. She wrinkled her nose and added: I’d think they were drunk, only none of them smelled like it.

  Mag sighed and rubbed at her eyes. Anabi kissing the corner of her lips got her to smile at least. “They might fight better drunk, anyway. Could pretend it was a saloon.” But she felt Hob’s note crinkle in her skirt pocket, the reminder that they did know people who could fight and did fight for their entire living becoming a grain of an idea that bounced in her thoughts, like sand blown along a dune face by the wind. “We ain’t mercenaries, and we ain’t had their time to practice, or their teachers. But mercenaries’ll do whatever you pay ’em for,” she said slowly. Anabi nodded encouragingly; she was long used to Mag thinking out loud at her. “So what if we offer to pay ’em for doin’ somethin’ other than killin’ for once? What if we pay ’em to train us? To find us a safe place to learn to use our guns?”

  She certainly couldn’t think of anyone else in the world better than Hob’s people when it came to shooting. Hell, they could hit things while screaming around at top speed on those damn motorcycles.

  The dead or alive price on Hob is getting pretty high, Anabi wrote.

  “You’re right about that,” Mag agreed. “Couldn’t be Hob doin’ it, nor any one of her people’s got a price on their head. But still.” It was better than nothing. And who knew, maybe Hob knew a way for people to practice with guns that didn’t require a lot of noise or wasting bullets. It was worth asking, and maybe worth paying for.

  She won’t like that.

  She smiled wryly at Anabi, who smiled back at her. “We don’t pay Hob to be happy. We pay her to get shit done.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  36 Days

  It was nearly midnight before Shige felt the full rollout of the new payroll system was adjusted to his satisfaction. He’d made certain to have some of the new chits sent to the wildcat sites early, a carefully introduced clerical error that Ms Meetchim would not care about if he was careful with her correspondence. To ensure the rest was as big a disaster as possible was more a piece of art. Breezy Corporate memos about the benefits and efficiency, the gratitude of workers on other worlds, would prime the company personnel to feel exceptionally stung by the almost certain rejection and pushback from the miners.

  He sent the memos to the flimsy spooler, then sat back and rubbed his eyes. From his intellectual remove, he almost enjoyed this work, just as he’d always enjoyed classic games like chess, Diplomacy, and Systems United as a child. There was an art to laying out the board so that, whichever way the pieces fell, he’d achieve his victory. But should he also remind himself that these were people, not inanimate game pieces? Blood would flow before this had all ended, and at least some of it would be on his hands. He had to keep the only faith he’d ever had, learned on Ayana’s knee: the blood of the few watered the tree that sheltered the many. And here, the sacrifice of lives now would save future generations of miners locally, and many more exploited people on a multi-system scale from the depredations of a corporation that had little interest in anything but its own profit.

  Shige was Ayana and Hamadi’s own personal sacrifice, he’d been told many times after the abrupt revelation of his un-birth. He’d also never been able to bring himself to ask if his older brother had been intended for his role and hadn’t wanted to play along. He’d been too angry at Coyote at the time, for all his horrible truths.

  He sighed and swept aside those unproductive thoughts. He was tired, and he couldn’t return to his sparsely furnished company apartment until he’d collated yet another set of reports Meetchim had happily dumped on him before she’d left for the night. Another stack built up during his absence, fal
len by the wayside.

  Shige fetched himself another cup of coffee. As he watched the thick brown liquid dribble into his standard TransRift-blue cup, he considered briefly the microinjectors he had hidden about his person, loaded with a range of poisons and drugs. He had a few with strong stimulants, and as exhausted as he felt, it was tempting. But with no idea when his next resupply would be, better to save those for a true emergency.

  At his desk, he went over the latest reports from the wildcat sites and surveys, and meticulously updated the map for Ms Meetchim’s consideration the next morning. The amritite veins – assuming that they’d correctly identified them in the surveys – were extraordinarily thin or nonexistent in the towns. Perhaps the mineral was simply that rare, though considering the effects its incorporation had on Mr Yellow, Shige had little doubt that TransRift would throw itself into chasing down every last grain. But as the surveys began to move outside of the towns, particularly to the north of Newcastle, there was some sign of the veins thickening, becoming more numerous – and beginning to curve deeper.

  Satisfied, he turned to the last report as his wristwatch let him know that he’d need to be up in three hours to get to the office. The final flimsies were rather crumpled, a field report no one had bothered to retype. Initial transmission from an undercover security team – Corporate code for Mariposa officers embedded in and controlling bandit groups – about a “witch” having been found in the desert and prepared for pickup.

  And then no follow-up. Shige checked the dates to find this had occurred while he’d been on Earth, weeks ago. The initial report receipt date was only yesterday, so there’d been a delay in transmission. That didn’t speak well of the retrieval of the witch. Or perhaps it had been a false positive. There was no way of knowing, from this.

  Frowning, he marked the report to be sent to security, to have a detail check up on it. Certainly not his top priority, but he had an interest in the witches of Tanegawa’s World after what he’d seen during the attack on Mr Green’s train.