by Alex Wells
“Hmm,” Meetchim said, noncommittal. “And your proposal for utilizing Mr Yellow?”
He was treading on more dangerous ground now, Shige realized. While he had not been at all blamed for the death of Mr Green, if anything bad were to happen to Mr Yellow while under his care, that would begin to look like a pattern – not that he would want anything bad to happen to the Weatherman now. He also needed to calculate if this exploration would be to the advantage of the Federal Union, though that butted up strangely against the duty he felt toward Mr Yellow. On the whole, he tended to think so; as long as the Union inspector arrived and they were able to take over before TransRift could fully exploit the new resource, it would be of use for the government. But this was a razor edge to walk, a level of industrial espionage to go with his other responsibilities. “Send him out to one of the wildcat sites that’s shown the most promising traces. See if he can sense anything, and express it in an actionable way. We won’t know what results we might get until we try.”
“And how do you propose we take him to the site?”
Always before, the Weatherman had been transported on a special train, with a full contingent of guards. There were no tracks built to the wildcat sites; there wasn’t a point when they weren’t producing. “Do we have any sort of air transport?”
Meetchim’s eyebrows went up. “There are cargo ospreys, left over from the settlement days, and a few attack helicopters belonging to Mariposa. They are almost never used due to the atmospheric hazards.”
“Ah, but if Mr Yellow is traveling with the flight, that will protect them from the atmospheric problems, will it not?”
“Security would be rather thin…” But Ms Meetchim had shifted from trying to pick his silly notion apart to detailing a potential plan, he could see.
“I doubt the rabble here are prepared for anti-aircraft measures. I wager Mr Yellow would be safer in the air than on the ground.” He frowned, considering the one truly loose cannon that still might be aimed at his plans. “Though there is the problem of the witches. I recall the one that showed itself at Primero when Mr Green went out there. It seemed to know we were there without being told.”
Meetchim smiled, a secretive expression. “Dr Kiyoder might have the answer to your prayers there. Without a Weatherman to keep her occupied until your arrival, I gave her free rein with some of her odder research projects.” She slid the maps across to him. “Pick the site you think might be promising for your experiment.”
He’d begun to look over the maps, focusing on the newer locations, when the elevator door at the far end of the office slid open. A man in the green Mariposa uniform stood there, looking very displeased: Security Chief Lien. Lien was shaped rather like a bullet, his head shaved. White scars stood out starkly on his brown-yellow skin, now flushed with anger. “Emergency report, sir,” he said.
Meetchim held her hand out, steady as a rock for the entirely too long time it took Lien to walk across the floor, boot heels clicking, and hand a flimsy over. She read it quickly. “The mining towns are voting to strike on payday. It seems some loose lips have leaked the currency change and they’re upset. I hope your feelings aren’t too hurt, Mr Rollins.”
“I’ll try to survive,” Shige said. He kept himself relaxed by force of will, waiting to see which way to jump on this. Would she blame him?
But Meetchim seemed more amused than anything. “You seriously overestimated their capacity for gratitude when you try to make their lives better. Any change will cause a tantrum, and I suppose the previous management gave them far too free a hand if they think this nonsense will stand.”
“The garrison is ready to mobilize,” Lien said stiffly.
“Send reinforcements out. But let them have their tantrum. The troublemakers will be known, and those will be the ones sent out to the next wildcat sites in chains. Let them be defiant when they remember they’re a speck in an ocean of sand.”
“You’re not concerned about a work stoppage?” Shige asked, a little surprised.
“We were already looking at mothballing the mines to focus on the new exploration until I receive the next personnel transfer. Break them up over a hundred dig sites where they’re stripped of resources and they’ll remember that they owe us their very lives. Like all tantrums, this is a performance, Mr Rollins. And there’s no one but us here to see.”
Shige smiled, thinking about the ever-approaching ship that would bring the inspector. “How right you are, Ms Meetchim.”
The basement lab was cool and lit steadily with bright overhead light strips. Both things were a marked improvement from when Shige had first delivered Mr Yellow down here.
Shige walked down the silent halls, his shoe heels clicking dryly on the perfectly smooth synthcrete floor. Dr Kiyoder’s office waited at the end of one such hall, walled off in glass in an otherwise barren gray room. She’d decorated the walls of her office with decals and transparent diagrams of the human nervous system and neural networks, beautiful dendritic representations in bright green and blue.
The interior of her office was one-half pristine, a perfectly organized desk and table. The other half was a chaos of equipment, loops of wire, tripods and what looked like transmitters and receivers, though Shige couldn’t guess for what. Radio and other wireless data transmission worked very poorly here; the equipment itself looked to be old, with new modifications.
Dr Kiyoder herself, a brown-haired woman golden-pale in the way that indicated she never went outside, sat at her table, drawing out something that he recognized a moment later as a neural circuit interface with neat lines. He rapped lightly on the glass panel that functioned as her door.
She looked at him and then offered him a cautious smile, waving him inside. “Mr Rollins! What brings you down here? Wanting to visit Mr Yellow? He was rather restless last night, though I can’t figure out why from the diagnostics.”
“It would be my pleasure, after we’ve spoken. But I actually came to see you.”
“Oh?” She waved a hand toward her table; he saw part of the stack of flimsies he’d delivered to her. “Thank you for all of the documentation from Dr Ekwensi, by the way. This will keep us busy for years. I’m already working on some correspondence for her.”
“It’s my pleasure to help. But… Ms Meetchim said you’ve been developing a possible solution to the witch problem?”
“Witch problem…? Oh, the contaminated individuals! Yes. After I studied the notes you were so good to take about Mr Green’s encounters with them. You are very good at taking notes, by the way, Mr Rollins. Have you thought about a transfer to a more technical specialization?”
He bowed his head. “You do me great honor, but I’m afraid I have no talent for science.”
Dr Kiyoder gestured toward the equipment that occupied the other half of the room. “There are known effects for the disruption of a Weatherman’s neural network. I springboarded off of those to see if similar transmissions could deter contaminated individuals. I’ve had some success working on the subjects we gathered here before Mr Yellow’s arrival. And I think I’ve found a balance where it will deter them, but not interfere with Mr Yellow. At least, the tests haven’t bothered him at all.”
“What about the subjects?” Shige asked.
Dr Kiyoder grimaced. “They were handed over to Mr Yellow shortly after his arrival so he could acclimate.”
Shige imagined that all too well: a white room, a person pushed inside with Mr Yellow waiting, a brief crunch and a slurping sound. He kept his expression smooth. “I see. Ready for field testing, then?”
“Why, yes! I’ve already sent a few units out to the wildcat sites on the offchance that there’s an intrusion.”
He raised his eyebrows. “How do you know they’re not just acting as a general deterrent?”
“Oh, a negative like that would be so difficult to prove. But they draw so much power that they can’t be run constantly on a site with such limited resources. The idea is that they’ll turn them on if ther
e’s an intrusion.” Kiyoder smiled brightly. “Is it terrible that I almost hope these so-called witches will try to attack a site? We can’t prove my work unless they do.”
“It isn’t terrible at all,” Shige said soothingly. He went over the rest of the details with Dr Kiyoder before excusing himself, already mentally composing his site proposal for Ms Meetchim. He very much wanted to see the success of Kiyoder’s experimental equipment as well. A means to control the contaminated population would be important for the future.
Perhaps he ought to try to point that Ravani woman toward his test site and see what happened. Give her a reason to think she’d be poking a finger in the eye of the company, and he had little doubt she’d be eager to do it. But he had to be cautious about how he used that particular weapon.
Shige turned down another hall, to Mr Yellow’s rooms, though his feet hesitated strangely at the start of it. No, he did want to see Mr Yellow. It was important to stay in his good graces, or what passed for those with a Weatherman – and perhaps he might even be lonely. For all Dr Ekwensi’s cautions, he did not think Mr Yellow a mere tool. He followed the wall of windows to find Mr Yellow in the “play” room, slowly weaving bright pink yarn around a set of wires in a tangle Shige couldn’t begin to understand.
This was how the Weathermen lived, when they weren’t piloting ships or in the core of planetary buildings, doing whatever mysterious thing they did to control the local space. They lived under glass, like curiosities in aquaria. Shige wondered if they minded, when this was the only life they’d ever known. He easily recalled, with his overly keen memory, Kazu shouting at him in a fit of temper that Shige belonged under glass, as shards of a shattered bottle crunched under their shoes in that terrifying, stinking alley – though he’d apologized for it later, in the dark of the night, saying he’d been afraid Shige would report him to their parents again.
Mr Yellow looked up as Shige paused outside the door, his eyes like black pits in his head. Shige tried to look away, but he felt that undeniable tug. Mr Yellow smiled, lips moving to form words Shige could feel: We miss you.
Chapter Twenty-Five
24 Days
The evening pay line outside the TransRift office was so quiet that the squeak and clank of the drive chain at the mine seemed loud, the sound of the wind brushing past the buildings in the full street a roar. Every miner from the day shift waited, silent and tense.
Mag stood under the awning of the company store, not quite part of the line that crowded the street. She didn’t exist on the TransRift payroll; she’d gotten what little money she had since arriving in Ludlow from the miners and other workers, in exchange for mending their clothes and sewing them new ones. Mostly she’d lived on Clarence’s charity, though he said she worked for him.
She wasn’t the only one not on the payroll watching the street, though. She saw, peeping from alleys and windows, standing back-up to buildings, other people who lived on the underside of the town, officially unnoticed by the company: cooks, medics more affordable than the company doctors, the informal veterinarian people took their pets to, those who cleaned houses and did repair work and crafted things the company would never sell. Their two musicians, their single artist who hand-drew portraits in exchange for food, their tailors. Many of them had been miners, once, before they’d been injured. Others had been kept out from the start by their families and found another way to survive.
They all had a stake in this too, even if no one but the miners had gotten a vote.
A stir went through the miners as the door to the pay office opened and a line of green-uniformed Mariposa security guards filed out. They pushed back the miners at the front of the line to make room for themselves, forming a wall around the office with a gap just big enough for one person at a time to get to the pay window.
Mag stepped down off the store’s porch and grabbed the sleeve of Omar, standing in the street. “Go up to the mine,” she said, keeping her voice low. Even then, it felt like shouting in the street. “Let the night shift know to walk out.”
“We ain’t seen the pay yet,” Omar said.
“Think they’d be comin’ out like this if it was a normal payday?” Mag asked. “Go.”
Omar wriggled through the press, elbowing here and there as necessary. A miner had her eyes fixed on Mag; she must have been listening in. “I don’t like this,” she said. “Pay’s pay.”
Mag opened her mouth to reply, but another miner cut her off. His tight black curls were plastered to his forehead with sweat and a skin of rock dust. “And a vote’s a vote,” he growled. “Pick your fuckin’ side.”
“We stick together,” Mag said, firmly. She stepped back up onto the porch so she could see over the crowd. She picked out Clarence, moving up to the pay window; the miners had agreed he should go first and stand for all of them.
Mag found herself leaning forward as he signed for his pay envelope and took it. The whole damn crowd felt coiled like a spring. They all knew what was coming, and had known since the first man in green had stepped out of the office.
Clarence took one step away from the pay window, enough to put him on the right side of the line of guards. He ripped open the envelope and then poured the brightly colored company scrip chits out onto the ground. The angry rumble that followed was a snarl of human voices.
“Company don’t want to give us real money,” Clarence said loudly. “Then we ain’t gonna give ’em real work.”
Mag saw movement from the corner of her eye; it must be the night shift, coming down already. Omar must have sprinted the whole way… no, she saw green. Nothing but green, more of it, blocking one end of the street like a bottleneck. She heard a shout to the left and turned to see more security men. The whole damn garrison must have turned out for this.
She clenched her jaw. They’d known it was impossible to keep anything like this a secret, but she still wanted to find whoever had warned TransRift and wring their neck with her own hands. This was going to get people killed.
Down the street, someone moved to shove one of the guards, but two other miners caught him and pulled him back into the group. This was another thing they’d talked about, argued over in meetings. Make them strike the first blow, Clarence had argued firmly, and Mag had backed him up. Don’t break the line. Most of Mariposa were scum who would be happy to wash the street with blood. But the pit boss, Bill, he wanted to believe he was a good guy, and he was still in charge. People who wanted to be able to keep believing their own stories might take the barest excuse to let things get ugly, but they still needed the excuse.
“There a problem?” came the familiar sound of Bill Weld’s voice. He stood in the doorway of the company office, only the shiny top of his bald head visible over the line of guards.
“You know there is,” Clarence said. “This is the last time I’ll repeat myself: You want real work from us, you give us real pay.”
“The company–” Bill started, and then was cut off by a wave of shouts from the miners, one Mag added her voice to so hard she felt like her throat would tear. His mouth moved a few sentence worth’s more, but then he stopped.
Clarence crossed his arms over his chest and waited for the crowd to simmer down. They’d talked about this. They’d practiced. They’d planned. They’d drilled it all together, like it was a performance. In a way, it was. “We ain’t here for your sales pitch. We’re here for our pay. Our real pay.”
Another roar that they all gave voice to. Mag saw the others like her, the people off the payroll, shouting too.
“We’re all gonna go home now,” Clarence said. “And the night shift too. And when you got our real pay, you tell us. We’ll come get it, and count every goddamn credit, and then we’ll talk.”
Almost as one, the crowd turned to face the greenbellies at either end of the street. Mag could have cheered. “We’re goin’ home!” someone shouted. “Let us out!” The shout repeated, became a roar. Mag looked at Bill, at his dough-pale face, and wondered if this would b
e the moment where he ordered the guards to fire.
They’d talked about that, too. And there was a reason so many of the miners were wearing their mine coats, even in the oppressive heat of the evening. Mine coats hid a lot of things. Mag felt the little pistol weigh heavy in her own pocket. They were trying to avoid bloodshed, but they weren’t stupid.
The woman who’d spoken before tried to move forward, toward the pay office. Her neighbors grabbed her. Mag stepped back down from the porch to get a firm hold of the back of the woman’s jacket. “We stand together,” she shouted in her ear. It was the only way to be heard over the crowd. “You break, you’re killin’ us. We ain’t gonna let you.”
They had to police their own, and she hated the thought. But it was sides now. Either stick with the other miners, or go stand with their enemy.
The woman stopped struggling. Around them, the crowd went quiet. Mag looked up to see Clarence had raised an arm. It was a signal they’d all been waiting for. She fixed her eyes on that spot behind the wall of green fabric and muscle that hid the pit boss, and willed him to not be an idiot.
“There’s no need to get nasty…” Bill began, and was silenced by another roar.
“You let us out,” Clarence said. “You let us go home. And we’ll come back to work when you meet our terms. Real pay. Real safety inspections. Decent hours. You think you got enough greenbellies to follow each and every one of us down into the mine with a gun to our heads?”
Stand down, Mag thought, teeth closed around just screaming out the words.
“Of course not,” Bill said, his voice strained. “Don’t be dramatic. I’ll… I’ll let the company know your concerns. I’m sure we’ll get this cleared up quick.”
