The Debt Collectors War

by Tess Mackenzie

  They had been converting power grids to data networks just as the third great phase of internet expansion began, when core bandwidth needs began exceeding the capacity of wireless networks, and people started transitioning back to wired internet. NewSol had been very well positioned to leverage its transmission-line-based data network into new business, as rival wired internet networks had been allowed to degrade during the second internet, and had lost capacity, and NewSol’s cabling was often the sole surviving provider in many areas. NewSol had done well. NewSol had done better than well. It had leveraged its links between the energy generation and data-provisioning sectors and taken early control of the first energy credit trading schemes, the systems of micro-transactional peer-to-peer trading of domestically generated energy from one consumer directly to another which became vital to the world economy as electric cars became widespread.

  NewSol had become a huge enterprise leveraging the energy credit trading schemes. It had evolved, and grown strong. Now, it was just a business, which bought and sold and traded, and supplied people and services, but everything it had, all of it, had been built up from energy credit trading and the manufacture of domestic solar generation panels. And along the way, because of the need to supply credit to customers, it had founded a bank, and because it owned a bank it had needed to collect its debts, and so it had begun a security division, and that security division was where Ellie and Sameh now worked.

  Ellie and Sameh worked for NewSol, and NewSol was also the workplace of a very worried, very important parent.

  Chapter 6

  The border crossing was done with a certain careless precision, which Ellie suspected was because border crossings here always were. They sat in a helicopter, and waited for clearance, and were given a vector and crossing time and told not to deviate by more an half a kilometer or a minute.

  The border-control operators were fussy, and pedantic, and didn’t seem to mix much with the debt-recovery personnel, as far as Ellie could see. She had a feeling the border-control operators kept themselves apart from everyone else because they knew they had to be prepared to turn on anyone without warning, if necessary.

  Ellie would have kept apart too, in those circumstances.

  Sameh was nervous and irritable, and stayed quiet, like she usually did when she was about to fly anywhere. Quiet and hostile and unsettling, too. The aircrew did their best to ignore her.

  They all waited, Ellie and Sameh in their full battle gear, with all their equipment, sitting in the helicopter with the engines already running. Then, when it was time, they rose into the air, and exchanged passcodes with border-control command, and then flew straight over the wall.

  Ellie looked down as they did, but couldn’t see much except dark grassy fields and fences. The wall’s actual infrastructure wasn’t visible at night. Even the floodlighting was infrared.

  They flew over the wall, and kept going for another ten minutes, to a forward operating base on the Měi-guó side. They landed, and looked around. The base was really just a fence and some prefab buildings and a helipad, used to make transfers like this securely. They got out of the helicopter, and into a large armored SUV, and drove, with another SUV as an escort, to a dropping-off point where they would meet a local guide.

  It was like Afghanistan, Ellie thought. It was almost the same. Flying in smaller and smaller hops, in smaller and smaller vehicles, being stared at by locals who lined the roads and watched, apathetically angry, because they had nothing else to do.

  Ellie was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver, because she liked to be able to see where they were going. Sameh was sitting behind her, quietly. Ellie glanced back and made sure she was all right.

  Sameh saw her look, and shrugged. That meant she was okay.

  “Here,” Ellie said, and held out a pack of med-pills, reaching backwards towards Sameh. They needed to be taking their meds every day again now.

  The meds were a mix of pre-emptive shock management drugs and mitochondrial DNA suppressants. The shock management component was to keep them alive to reach a modern hospital, preferably in Canada, and the DNA suppressant was so that if they did, and survived surgery, then their chances of suffering multiple organ failure several days later became almost nothing. That drug stopped their white blood cells producing excess free-floating DNA after serious injury, because free-floating DNA caused the fever which led to multiple organ failure. Together, the meds were a wonder-drug that prevented almost all non-instantaneous and non-surgical deaths in combat. It was said if you survived the first two minutes after an injury you would live. But the meds needed to be taken daily, because both drugs already needed to be in the bloodstream when the injury occurred to be effective.

  Sameh took the packet of pills, and swallowed one, and passed them back. Ellie took one too, then went back to looking out the windows.

  The scenery was nice, she thought. They were on an old road, in a valley, with dark forested hills above them and a river to the side. The hills were a little like Afghanistan, but prettier, because they weren’t so dry. It reminded her of some of the nicer bits of Russia and the Belarus, she thought. She’d almost come here on holiday.

  Almost, except for how they were driving through a refugee camp, and had been since they got out the helicopter.

  Temporary housing lined the road. There were a lot of tents. Tents, and demountable houses, and trailers and campervans and other movable housing. People seemed to have just washed up here, and stopped where they stopped, close enough to the Canadian border they could hope, but not so close they got chased off by border patrols. These were all the people whose credit history or security checks had prevented them from entering Canada. They lived here, and waited, and hoped, in mile after mile of portable, transient housing, with occasional toilet blocks and cooking facilities operated by the big Asian charities.

  It was depressing, Ellie thought. Such intense, futile hope.

  She watched the locals for a while, still outside and staring as they passed, even at night.

  “Hey,” she said to the driver, beside her, suddenly wondering. “What do we call all of them?”

  “Call who?”

  Ellie pointed. “Them. The locals.”

  “Americans.”

  “Yeah, but there’s always a rude name. Like hajji. The name you call them behind their backs. So what is it here?”

  He grinned. “Debtors.”

  “Just debtors?”

  “Yeah. They don’t like it.”

  Ellie nodded slowly. That actually made a certain sense.

  *

  They drove quickly through the night. The local team seemed to know the road, and seemed to expect it to be safe. They were behaving that way, anyway. They seemed relaxed, alert but not anticipating trouble, so Ellie decided to trust their judgment, and made herself relax too.

  An ambush was unlikely, she supposed. Not this close to the wall, this early in the mission, and not when they were heading off in a random direction which shouldn’t have been obvious to a casual observer as they set out. An ambush now meant an intel leak inside the company, and that would be a catastrophically bad thing. An ambush would be the least of their problems, if they actually had an intel leak, but Ellie didn’t think they did. There was no reason to think they did.

  Everything was fine.

  They drove fast. The drivers had imaging visors on, and so could travel as fast at night, without lights, as they could in daylight. The road was rough, though. That was the only nuisance about going fast. As Ellie suspected, it hadn’t been repaired in a long time, and the winters here would have snow and ice which destroyed road surfaces quickly. The road was rough, and they were being bumped around a lot. Ellie held on to the hand-grip over her head, and behind her, Sameh had her knee against the back of Ellie’s seat, bracing herself. The driver did his best to avoid the potholes.

  After half an hour, they reached a roadside lay-by in another valley, above another river. Another SUV was waiti
ng, a local one, older and battered looking, with an American man standing beside it.

  Ellie got out, and looked around. It was quiet and cold, like in the mountains in Afghanistan. She looked around carefully, warily, glancing at a tablet in her hand to check the feed from the thermal imager mounted on her submachine gun.

  Everything seemed quiet.

  Everything would seem quiet, she thought suspiciously, if they were about to be ambushed. But if they were, then everything would seem overly quiet, far too quiet. Now, it seemed like there was the right amount of noise. There were still birds in the trees, and animals rustling in the scrub, and the man waiting for them wasn’t standing as if he was about to try and duck for cover.

  It didn’t feel like there would be trouble, and there were drones somewhere above them, anyway, still watching, still on guard. Ellie had her comm earpiece in, and it was working. She could hear chatter in the background.

  She was safe. Someone would warn her if the drones saw anything. She lowered her submachine gun, and walked over to the American.

  “Are you our guide?” she said.

  He nodded. “Joe.”

  She thought about that, then said, “Seriously?”

  “For this. On anyone’s records. And in my bank. Yeah, it’s Joe.”

  “Joe Smith?”

  He grinned. “Joe Brown. But pretty much the same thing.”

  “I’m Ellie,” Ellie said. “That’s Sameh. Don’t startle her or piss her off, and she won’t kill you.”

  Joe looked at Sameh, and nodded, and seemed to take the warning completely seriously. That said a lot about his instincts, and therefore his usefulness as a guide. Ellie felt a little better about him. She hadn’t liked having to trust a guide who someone else had chosen.

  Joe looked at Sameh, and then said something in hajji. The hello and god-bless they all said to each other, with the really polite bit about extending hospitality, as well.

  Sameh thought for a moment, and then said the right things back.

  Ellie watched, and thought too. She was wondering why Joe had done that, and what it meant, and what he was trying to tell her. She decided it was better to ask, rather than waste time wondering.

  “You speak hajji?” she said.

  “Pashto,” Joe said. “And a little Arabic.”

  Ellie looked at him, slightly irritated he’d been so specific. He was going to spoil her careful pretence of dislike and ignorance. She pretended to know less about hajjis than she actually did, and to dislike them more, because it was an old, nasty habit everyone seemed to pick up in wars. Just like the operators here probably complained about the stupidity of debtors, and private security teams in Shanghai would sneer at the superficiality of their clients. It was a habit, something everyone did, but once someone pointed it out, then it was obviously a pretence because you couldn’t do a job like this in places like they did and actually loathe the locals.

  “So hajji?” Ellie said, after a moment, not quite willing to give up her pretence just yet. Even though she obviously spoke enough Arabic to know that Joe had been speaking it, too.

  Joe thought about that. Then he grinned. “Afghan hajji and the other hajji too,” he said.

  Then he looked at Sameh.

  His point was pretty clear. Of course Ellie knew the difference, and of course she spoke a little as well, when Sameh’s name was so obviously from the MidEast. Ellie sighed. One of these days she ought to talk to Sameh about calling herself Sarah or something at work. Then Ellie could keep being as nasty and ignorant as she wished without smartasses correcting her.

  Ellie looked at Joe for a moment, still not completely sure why he’d done that. If he was trying to tell her something, though, he’d made his point. He’d been overseas, and was a smartass too, and apparently wanted her to know about both.

  And now that she did, she could go back to deciding whether she trusted him.

  Ellie glanced over at Sameh, and made a slight gesture with her two smallest fingers towards her ear. They had hand-signals they used between themselves, private little signs they’d worked out together and which no-one else knew. That one told Sameh to start a voice-stress analyzer and then to quietly listen, and tell Ellie if Joe was lying.

  Sameh took out a tablet, very casually, and Joe didn’t seem to especially notice her doing it. People had tablets around all the time, checking this or doing that, and he was mostly paying attention to Ellie, anyway.

  “Go on,” Ellie said to Joe. “Tell me.”

  Joe seemed a little confused.

  “You speak lots of languages,” Ellie said. “You know how to be polite in other places. So how did that happen? Have you worked in the MidEast?”

  Joe nodded.

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough.”

  Ellie looked at him, then tapped her comm and told whoever was listening to send the local guide’s personnel file to her tablet. And his security file too.

  Joe looked at her for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Can we start again?” Ellie said. “I do need to know.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  Ellie tapped her comm again. “Someone have a CEO or something call the guide.”

  “Don’t bother,” Joe said, into his own comm.

  Ellie grinned at him. “Someone would call.”

  “I believe you.”

  “We’re doing something important,” Ellie said.

  “They told me.”

  “I can’t tell you what.”

  “They told me that too.”

  “I can’t tell you yet,” Ellie said. “But I do need to know I can trust you.”

  “Okay. So ask what you want to know.”

  “You worked in the MidEast,” Ellie said.

  “I did.”

  “And now you’re here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Joe shrugged. “I need to work.”

  “Why work for us? Against your own people?”

  “I’m from here,” he said. “But I’m not one of these people.”

  Ellie nodded. Sameh got the same way about hajjis and hajji places, and Ellie supposed she would as well, if Australia had ever fallen apart as completely as half the rest of the world had.

  “Just tell me,” Ellie said. “Please. It’ll save me having to read it.”

  “I worked in the MidEast, back before the debt settlement. Work like this. I know what I’m doing.”

  Ellie nodded.

  “I have no personal debt,” Joe said. “I’ve never defaulted. And I’m cleared with the debt settlement agency.”

  “But?” Ellie said.

  “But when things got bad here, I came back to look after my family.”

  Suddenly, Ellie felt more sympathetic. Which might well be the point, she reminded herself. It could be a lie, intended to arouse sympathy, but she didn’t think it was. It had a feel of truth. Something of the sort had happened to a lot of people, and especially people Joe’s age. He was a little older than Ellie, old enough for it to be true.

  “Family like kids?” Ellie said.

  “Parents.”

  Ellie nodded again. “Go on,” she said.

  “I came back,” Joe said. “And kept working. Doing fixed-point patrols for the border authority, mostly. Then a couple of years ago they cancelled cross-border travel to cut down on workhouse escapes. So now I’m stuck here.”

  “You couldn’t get out?” Ellie said. It was fairly common for people like them to have two or three or ten different legal identities.

  “I didn’t try,” Joe said.

  “We could get you out easily enough.”

  “But not my father. He’s debt-bound to his house. He can’t leave without paying out the bank.”

  “Oh,” Ellie said. “Yes, of course.”

  It wasn’t an uncommon situation. Even people in Australia and China ended up trapped in that way, the ones who’d taken mortgages with marginal lenders, and then had
one of the intermittent housing bubbles burst and wipe out the value of their equity. Once a house was worth less than what was owed on it, the resident was stuck. If they wanted to relocate they had very few choices. They could pay the lender the difference and sell, which was usually unaffordable, or they could sell anyway, becoming a defaulting debtor, and then try to hide from both the lender and the purchaser of the soon-to-be repossessed house, which rarely worked, or they could stay in the house, and make their payments month by month, and hope that in thirty or fifty years they got free of the lender. It happened everywhere, and was the cost of cheap lending. It would probably have happened to Ellie eventually, if she hadn’t ended up in the life she had instead.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Joe, meaning it.

  “It’s fine,” Joe said. “It’s life. I do here what I’d be doing there, anyway.”

  Ellie nodded, thinking. It was a good story, a believable story, and it was reassuring to have some idea why he had ended up here. It made him more trustworthy, which was why she had asked.

  It was exactly the story she’d tell if she was Joe, and trying to be deceitful.

  After a moment, she tapped her comm. “Whoever’s there,” she said. “Do you have the guide’s personnel file open?”

  “Yes ma’am,” a voice in the control room said.

  “Was any of what he just told me not true?”

  “No ma’am.”

  Ellie glanced at Sameh, who nodded slightly. She hadn’t seen anything wrong, either.

  So what Joe had said fit his records, and had sounded true to the analyzer software as well. So either he was a good liar, good enough to beat the kind of software a tablet could run, or he wasn’t lying at all.

  He might be a good liar, Ellie thought, and he might have paid someone to insert false data into the company records, but that was all starting to seem very complicated, and increasingly unlikely. It seemed like too much trouble to go to, just so a smuggling group or anti-debt militia could insert one of their own into Ellie’s team. It wasn’t very likely, Ellie thought, unless her mission was already compromised, and if it was, if they were compromised, then the company was leaking from a far higher place than she could ever hope to prevent. And worse, thinking that way led to worry and indecision, and got nothing useful done. She made herself stop. She wasn’t planning around leaks. She was assuming there weren’t any, and that she and Sameh were unnoticed, lost in the bustle and noise of debt-recovery and collections operations that would be going on all week here. She had checked two channels independently, the records and the truth of Joe’s words, and two independent checks ought to be enough.