Up Against It

by M. J. Locke

  “Andre Ramirez?”

  “Yeah,” Amaya said. Ramirez was a bank officer they had traded ice harvest takings to once or twice, and he had always been fair. “Get him to call the cops.”

  “And hurry!” Geoff and Amaya said in unison.

  Then they took off at a run down the stairs.

  Contacting the black marketers wasn’t all that hard, so the wikis said. You hung out on a corner in their neighborhood with your waveface wide open. Eventually, someone would ping you with an address. The message had a short half-life, and the address was always different, but the destination was somewhere in the borders of the Badlands, just above Bottomsville. There, they would cut you a deal in one of the surveillance shadows—out of sight of motes, mites, security cams, and other such devices.

  When they first reached the appointed corner, Ian was nowhere to be seen. Because he was already dead? Geoff tried to shake off the thought. The whirring of engines echoed down the Promenade from a nearby manufacturing plant, or a bug juice piping manifold. Gusts of steam emanated from grates and rolled down the street, smelling of bug juice, trash, machine oil, and old urine. The odor made Geoff queasy, and the heavy gravity made his joints hurt. He shifted, turned up his collar, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. At least the stink was a warmish one; it wasn’t as cold here as up in the spoke.

  “What now?” Amaya asked.

  “I suppose we could ask around,” Geoff said. A few people were scattered about the neighborhood, but none of them seemed to be black marketers. A woman was carrying groceries and trying to keep her toddler from dashing into the middle of the Promenade, toward the tracks where the commuter and robotic traffic ran. Three workers in greasy coveralls had removed panels from the walkway and were repairing a utility line. Three school-aged kids were bouncing a ball off a wall to one another, singing a rhyme, the Zekie Spokeways rhyme, as fast as they could:

  “No, Noonie, Weenie, Wee;

  “Weesu, Suzee, So, See;

  “Easy, Ee, Eenie, Nee;

  “Drop the ball and breach the Zee…”

  But right then Ian came strolling up. His right eye was swollen. Geoff suppressed a guilty grimace. Amaya, arms folded, glowered. Geoff reconsidered his choice: maybe she had not been the right one to bring. He gave her a warning glance. She shrugged, microscopically.

  “Chiisu,” he said.

  Ian lifted a hand in a casual wave. “Chiisu. I was wondering when you’d show up. You’re late for the party.”

  “Um, sorry—” He gestured at Ian’s shiner. Ian shrugged with a sheepish look, and gestured at Geoff’s tender, swollen nose. “Likewise.”

  “Look, let’s get out of here, Ian. This isn’t our turf.”

  But Ian wasn’t listening. “I’ve met some guys, and they’re ready to deal. They want to give us a hundred thousand for Ouroboros! That’ll get us to Earth with wads of cash left over for trainers and living expenses.”

  Geoff started to speak, but Amaya interrupted. “Bukkurosu yo!” She shoved Ian’s shoulder. “Idiot! I’m going to pound you! You have no idea what you’re doing. They’re criminals!”

  Ian tried a grin; it came out more like a grimace. “They’re just trying to make a buck, Amaya. Come on…”

  Geoff shook his head, arms folded. “We’re not making a deal with them. Kam is already at the bank, trading our ice in.”

  Ian’s face went through a series of contortions. “No fucking way! We’d only get a tenth of what these guys are offering. If that!”

  “I told you. I’m not selling my ice on the black market.”

  “Then you’re the idiot.”

  They stared at each other. When he saw they weren’t going to budge, Ian’s anger drained away, leaving fear in its place. He leaned close. “Don’t you guys get it? They know about the ice now. They’re watching us. We have to sell to them.”

  “And that’s just the way you planned it, isn’t it?” Amaya asked. “You are such an asshole.” She cut herself off with a growl. Ian looked both mad, embarrassed, and sick to his stomach.

  Geoff said to Ian, “You can stick around if you want. But Amaya and I are leaving. Come on,” he told her. He turned—and nearly ran into a man with a hairless chest. He took a step back and looked up.

  The hairless man must have weighed a hundred fifty kilos. He wore an expensive business suit but no shirt beneath. He had deep blue skin and a bald head. Neon coursed across his chest in rivulets of light. He seemed unaffected by the chill in the air. His sammy cache was full to the brim, and pulsed an alarming red. The sight of it made Geoff’s neck hair bristle. His companions’ caches weren’t much better.

  “What seems to be the problem here?” the man asked. The others fanned out around them.

  “Just a misunderstanding,” Ian said, with a nervous chuckle, while Geoff replied, “No problem. We were just leaving.”

  He and Amaya tried to go around them, but one of the men blocked their path. Geoff’s heart pounded.

  “We hear you got some high-carbon ice,” the guy who had stepped into their path said. He had a tuft of white hair at the crown, and his scalp, face, and neck bled neon like the other guy’s chest did.

  “High-quality stuff,” a third said. “A good ten tons or more.”

  “You trying to cut us out?” Blue Tattoo asked.

  Geoff folded his arms across his chest. “I didn’t make any deal with you. And it’s my ice to trade—not his,” with a jerk of his head toward Ian. “I’ve already made a deal with the bank. They’re waiting for us to get there and sign. If we don’t show soon, they’ll call the cops.”

  Blue Tattoo looked from Geoff to Ian and back. He looked thoughtful. Then he chuckled. “Bullshit. You don’t show, your banker buddy’ll assume you’re full of crap and won’t give it another thought.”

  He leaned into Geoff’s face. His breath stunk of bacteria and old booze. “Here’s how it works. You deal with us or we leave your cold-ass corpses up top for the cops to find.”

  Geoff’s hands balled up. Asshole. He started to retort, but a large group of people passed nearby: Downsiders, talking noisily. Tourists? They must be—he heard one of them call Phocaea “foh-KAY-uh” instead of “foh-SEE-uh.” Geoff tried to bolt toward them with a yell—“Hey! Help!” but he was jerked backward by his hair. Someone clamped a hand over his mouth and nose, which started bleeding again. They were manhandled into an alleyway.

  “Goddamn, he’s bleeding all over the place.”

  “You broke his nose, you jerks,” Amaya said. She shoved them back and made her way over to hand him a cloth scrap smeared with bike grease. He pressed it to his face.

  The gang exchanged looks. One of the men said something Geoff couldn’t make out, something about “heroes,” “look at their caches,” and “just let it go.” He realized they had been recognized.

  Blue Tattoo said, “Nah, that much goods, we can’t just blow it off, even for them, or our asses will be for shit. We’ve got to talk to the money about this one. Bring them.”

  9

  Back at her office, Jane called Benavidez but he was tied up, so she left a message with Thomas Harman, describing what had happened to her at the memorial. “The Ogilvies are obviously hauling out the big guns on this one. I checked his background. This Nathan Glease is a junior partner of Bock, Titus, and Thomson, a Martian law firm with ties to the Ogilvie crime family. He’s an up-and-comer—extremely smooth, aggressive, and smart. We’ll have trouble with him.”

  “I’ll make sure the prime minister gets the word,” Thomas said.

  Next she put a call into Sarah Ryan, her friend and legal counsel.

  Sarah invoked legal privacy, and said, as motes fell like ash around Jane, “I’ve opened up my calendar. I’m good for a meeting tomorrow afternoon. Are you free at one-thirty?”

  “I’ll make it so. I also need you to run a check for me.” Jane gave Sarah a rundown on her encounter with Glease and his muscle, and beamed the info she had dug up. “I want to know
who Grease’s local connections are.”

  “You’re in nickname mode already? He’s in for it now.”

  “We’ll see,” Jane said, though Sarah’s tone made her smile. “Ogilvie & Sons won’t come down easy. I need everything you can find on this guy. He’s got to have a counterpart licensed in Phocaea, doesn’t he?”

  “Not necessarily … not unless he’s planning to file a legal motion of some kind. But he may still have found someone to help him oil the local machinery. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “See what hits you get on the other man, while you’re at it. Grease called him ‘Mills.’”

  Sarah took a few notes. “I’m on it. I’ll give you an update tomorrow.”

  Jane also made an appointment for a checkup. Doctor’s visits were off-limits to the cameras. She was certain the Voice had been a stress-induced aberration, but she would feel better to have a doctor tell her she was fine. She spent the rest of the morning responding to the PM’s information requests, resolving priority conflicts, making calls, keeping key players up-to-date on the crisis; defending her people to Parliament staffers: buying time.

  She was still cold. Marty had not been able to come up with a sweater for her, only a spacer technician’s thermal undergarment, which would stick out under her outfit. She couldn’t possibly get away with wearing it during business hours. Her fingers kept going numb. She shivered, and eyed with longing the thalite underwear dangling like Peter Pan’s shadow against the wall’s eyelets.

  Finally, with a sigh of disgust, she donned the underwear. Protocol be damned; temperatures were down to seven degrees C. She was tired of a cold nose and ears, tired of numb hands and feet.

  Thomas Harman called her at just before noon, while she was updating her resource-use daily trend report.

  “Trouble,” he said. “Reports of looting on Levels 226 through 228.”

  New Little Austin. “Has anyone been hurt?”

  “There’ve been injuries. No reported deaths.”

  “Thanks for letting me know,” she said.

  A smirk flicked across his face. “This isn’t just a courtesy call. The prime minister wants you down there.”

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. “Whose idea was this?”

  “Look, the PM is just trying to help you out. Our analysts are telling us you’re on the cusp of a sammy dive.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Take a look at your numbers. Your bad-sammy count is on an upward trend and your good-sammies are headed down.”

  “So? My numbers have been up and down before.”

  “Not like this. The whole administration is vulnerable right now. You’ve got to play the game.”

  Jane sighed. Goddamn it.

  “Go down there and make a speech,” Thomas said. “Express your concern. Your presentation at the memorial was awfully stiff and you hardly gave the press ten seconds afterward.”

  “Oh for— My friends’ son had just died! What do you expect?”

  “The battle wagons are circling, and you’re the one in their sights. Your job is in jeopardy. Benavidez is trying to help.”

  “Talking to the public isn’t going to make me any more popular than I am now, if I fail to get the resource allocation system under control.”

  He looked straight at her. “You are Madam Resource Maven. You don’t talk and they are going to assume the worst.”

  As well they should, she thought.

  He signed off. She toyed with the idea of not going. But she needed to keep Benavidez on her side right now. More important, Thomas had scored a point, damn him. People were scared. She had a responsibility, however painful she might find it, to give them information and assuage their concerns.

  The lifts were locked down and her waveware politely informed her that all citizens were requested to remain on their own levels till further notice. She used her access code to secure a lift, and arrived at Level 226 in a swarm of chaos: shouts, people pushing each other and running around beyond the opening doors of the lift. As she stepped out, a speakerphone blared in her ears, both live and across her wave connection: “—is the police! Come out with your hands on top of your head! Attention, all citizens in the Mall! This is the police—”

  She pressed her hands to her ears and passed through the police cordon. The mayor and police chief, just ahead, were heading for a uniformed officer holding a loudspeaker. She made her way toward them. Beyond was the New Little Austin Mall, a three-level warren of shops, living spaces, and crannies along the sides of a narrow atrium. Reporters and their remotes were kept behind the barricades, but she felt their cameras on her, and the spy-glamour was chokingly thick.

  Rioters on the upper levels were heaving trash or heavy, pointy objects over the railings. It was well over half a gee here—high enough for the larger items and chunks of debris to do damage. Looters were breaking into the shops and running out with goods: food, clothing, survival gear, electronics, optronics, and bionics. People ran toward the police barricade, dodging debris, hands on heads, shouting their innocence. A group of police officers herded them over out of the way. A large troop of police loped past in riot power-suit regalia, wielding canisters of riot foam and shock sticks. The smell of fear, sharp and sour, hit her nostrils, and one young man’s hands trembled on his shock stick as he passed.

  As she approached the small knot of officials and media representatives, a group of suspected looters was hustled past. One of them, a teenaged boy maybe sixteen or seventeen, shouted, “Commissioner! Commissioner—I have something important to—ow—!”

  A police officer shoved him. Jane eyed the boy; he was nobody she knew. She wondered, briefly, if he had been an acquaintance of Hugh’s or Dominica’s. Probably just some kid hoping to bullshit his way out of trouble. Though his sammy cache was impressively big and green for his age. Maybe she should at least talk to him—but she saw that they had already manhandled him into a nearby lift and the doors closed. Oh, well.

  Then they all stared as an old man ran out of a store on the highest mezzanine, chased by looters swinging clubs and sticks. He vaulted one-handed over the railing—an amazing leap for a man his age—landed hard on the first level, then staggered to his feet and limped toward them, arms high.

  More debris rained down. The rioters’ taunts pursued him. The shopkeeper ignored the rioters’ jeers as he limped toward the cordon. Jane had to admire his courage; if he had not jumped, they might have beaten him to death. The reporters and officials around her were just standing there, watching him, and the medics were all busy.

  For heaven’s sake, she thought, annoyed; he can barely walk. She jogged out to give him assistance.

  He was old, at least a hundred thirty, stooped and bald, and was nursing his ankle. “You OK?” she asked. He nodded with a grunt, face pinched with pain. Behind them they heard shouts, as the police moved up into the higher levels—crackling of shock batons being deployed—hissing blasts of disabling foam—the rioters’ and looters’ screams. More debris bounced and flew overhead. They ducked.

  “Thank you, Commissioner.”

  “You’re welcome.” With his arm over her shoulder they headed around the corner past the cordon, to a paramedic station. She asked, “What started it?”

  “Group of folks come running along the walk yelling that life support was infected,” he said. “Damnedest thing I ever did hear.”

  “What?”

  “You heard right. Diseased. Everything about to be eaten up and destroyed. Grab what you need, they said, get out while you can. Some kind of nano-mutation or computerized virus breaking out into meatspace.”

  “That’s nonsense. There are way too many fail-safes.”

  He shrugged. “Some people just like to make trouble. These six kids, they’re loitering around, I’d just told them they had to leave. They hear the hollering and see the looters breaking things, and they start knocking stuff off my shelves. Just to be mean, I guess.

  “I try and stop �
�em, someone pushes me over and I clob me head.” He touched a swollen area on his forehead with a wince. “I come to, me place is being trashed, those young troublemakers see me try and get up and come at me with big sticks just for the shear joy of bashin’ on an old man.” Anger flashed in his eyes. “I took the leader out with a stool, made a break for it, outrun the little bastards, and jumped over the railing.”

  She smiled. “I saw. Impressive leap. It’ll make the evening news.”

  He smiled back, ruefully. “Still got me Downsider reflexes, I guess.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “They destroyed my inventory, what the looters didn’t steal.” He said it without expression, but it still hit Jane like a rock in the face. “Don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  She turned him over to the medics, wishing him luck, feeling helpless and angry. By the time she got back over to where the mayor and police chief were directing the riot control efforts, the uprising was over: the police were bringing out rioters cuffed to prison sticks. The leaders seemed to be a small group of young teens. They jeered and taunted the adults standing there, as the police steered them along toward the elevators.

  “What caused the riot?” she asked Jimmy Morris.

  It was Jerry Fitzpatrick who replied. “No idea yet.” The chief of police towered over her and the mayor, and spoke in a monotone. “Rumors of impending doom. That’s all we know.”

  “The old shopkeeper told me they were telling everyone that our life-support systems are carrying an infection,” she said.

  “You’d know better than us,” Morris replied.

  “Both the assembly and life-support systems are fine. The city’s manufactories, too. So who knows? The only thing going on with life support right now,” Jane replied, “are some simulations my folks are doing to identify the root cause of the lock failures.”

  “The press want a word,” one of JimmyM’s staffers said.

  “Let them come on over,” Jimmy replied. Within moments they were surrounded. Dutifully, sweating under the lights and thick spy-mote glamour, Jane gave them a few words. She promised a more lengthy news conference soon.