by Leo Champion
“It’s never been done,” said Hamill. “There’s got to be a reason for that.”
“How many airbornes have taken over tenements?” Hammer asked. “That’s a serious question. Streetgangers have done it occasionally, but does anyone know of an airborne gang that’s taken over a tenement?”
Heads shook. And there was a reason for that; without becoming a tenement guard himself, and taking over from that direction, Hammer would never have been able to grab his four blocks. Airbornes were hirelings and no more than that, and a large airborne gang was twelve flyers. You couldn’t take over a tenement with only a dozen people.
“So we’re the first ones to think through what we’d really hate,” Hammer said. “And I have the resources to put that into action. We’re going to get bombed tomorrow if it doesn’t happen tonight. Let’s make it hard for them.”
Chapter Eleven
To Santos’ left as she flew south, the mighty United Nations clusters on the Lower East Side were fading from their shimmering rainbows as the sun began to rise behind them. They were said to be the tallest buildings in the world, each of them almost a mile high; by international law, nothing could ever be built higher than them. The eighteen gigantic buildings cast a rainbow neon shadow across the city in the early morning.
Oh yes, the girls flew. They mostly didn’t fly bombing runs, because there were always young men eager to prove their courage and their worthiness to fly runs, by… flying runs. To Santos, as she headed south at about a thousand feet, following Fifth Avenue with the Lower East Side South cluster giving way to tenements and high-buildings over the East Village and the No-Go Zone, that was insanity. There was a reason thirty was old for a male airborne; flying low with people firing at you? No thanks. She expected to reach her fifties like her mother, at the Airedale, was.
But there was no shortage of boys – Parasite had been the latest – looking to fly for the glory and the cash. The girls, and boys, that they dismissively called ‘grounders’ flew too, just not with ordnance on paid runs.
She kept a wise, safe height as she headed south over Fourteenth Avenue into the No-Go Zone, staying around a thousand feet, well above the tops of the taller buildings that weren’t arkscrapers and often having to dodge up and down to avoid skyways between the scrapers. Rooftops passed below her, tenements then high-building country. She was cursing Hogan a bit, because she’d been kept frustratingly for a full day until the gang lead finally went to sleep and she could slip off to the Marauders’ rooftop to get the news to Charlie Marder.
Sally, her friend Marder’s chief grounder, had told her that the Marauders were on their way to a new rooftop; she was given directions and two heavy bags, about fifty pounds in all, of stuff to bring there since she was headed that way. Sally had apparently had a radio, but the news had waited twenty-four hours; it could wait another thirty minutes until she could speak with Hammer personally.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that prospect. On the one hand, he would pay her something for the warning, and she liked money as much as anyone in the city did. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to coldly accept cash from Jeff Hammer, as though there’d been nothing between them. Perhaps from his perspective she had been just a disposable fucktoy who fixed his wings. She hoped not, but it was possible.
She remembered Jeff Hammer and she resented him. He’d been so idealistic, with his talk of living in a better world – until something had happened about a year ago, something he must have read in one of his books. He’d gotten cold, stopped fucking her, stopped fucking anyone so far as she could tell. He’d drilled the gang into practicing with rocks again, dropping carefully weighed bricks from measured-known heights, and…
It had seemed pointless and she’d said so at the time, and her reward for honesty had been his back. He’d turned cold in bed, stopped talking, gone obsessively into his books and his rock-dropping experiments and drilling the gang on what he was learning from those… the books he’d never bothered to ask if she could read, and therefore assumed she couldn’t.
She’d warned him, too. That the Hawks were getting a reputation, that he was getting plenty of runs but making enemies with vendettas, and some of those people take it personally when you bomb them… and he’d shrugged it off as “acceptable business risk.”
But it had been more than just his own neck – ironic, it hadn’t in the end even been his neck – on the line. It had been Ubi and Blue and C-Bill and Donner and Parasite who had died too because of Jeff Hammer’s ambition, and she hadn’t hesitated to put the away-flag up on their prime rooftop when the news had come through. Down meant dead. She’d heard something about how he’d surfaced as a tenement guard and was doing something with Charlie Marder, but… she never thought she’d see him again.
But it was an opportunity. Tenement bosses had cash and resources. She could be a pair of ears for him at the Airedale, or even the Independent… but she could do more than that, if she had the tools. She had more than just warning to offer Boss Hammer; she had a proposal.
* * *
Clouds of squeaking and squealing bats flew around Santos as she circled the Washington Building, carefully and slowly losing height having identified the rooftop Sally had described. The bats fed off the insects drawn by the arkscraper trash dumps, but now as the sun started to rise they were starting to fly back to their roosts in the abandoned buildings. Every so-often one of them struck the glider, bumping it slightly, or collided with her body. But they weren’t a flight hazard.
Marder’s new occupied rooftop directly overlooked the arkscraper’s thermal vents with their constant streams of lift-giving hot air. It was the only one with lights and motion as people set things up; the landing area was clear, though, and she landed without trouble. Soon she’d unharnessed herself while a couple of grounders chained Hogan’s glider down. It was a busy rooftop, with tenement soldiers in green T-shirts and blue jeans working a hoist to bring pieces of heavy furniture up from the street. Maybe having friends in the dirt did have its advantages… those sofa pieces looked comfortable.
Charlie Marder, as he came up to her, was wearing a green-shirted uniform, with double gold captain’s tracks on each shoulder board. Tennie now, huh, she thought. Or at least permanent contract…
“Sally sent these with me,” she said, gesturing at the bags fastened to the glider. “They’re yours. Where’s Jeff, I need to see him.”
“Santos?” Marder asked, about to hug her and then drawing back. “Can I ask why you’re dropping by?”
“I have warning for your boss,” she said. “Can you connect me with him?”
“You can tell it to me,” said Marder. “I’ll pass it on.”
“His ears only,” said Santos. Because she didn’t trust Marder not to cut her out of any reward money, and she had more than just warning to offer.
“You missed him by about five hours. He went back to the tenement.”
“Can he come back?” Santos asked.
“No, but – OK, Santos, if you’re bullshitting me over this, I will have your head,” Marder said slowly. “How urgent is this news for him?”
“I have information that I promise he will appreciate,” said Santos. “It is time-sensitive. Look, you think I’m going to come all the way from the Lower East Side just to deliver you Sally’s bags?”
Marder thought for a moment, then turned.
“Sergeant Haskins,” he said.
A tenement soldier with three copper chevrons pinned to each shoulder of his T-shirt, turned from nearby. He was tall and handsome, with rakish black hair.
“Yeah?”
“Your squad was going back to the tenement soon,” Marder said.
“Got to get some sleep if we’re to be up for the Assembly,” the sergeant said.
“You can head back now. Take this woman to the Chapel, make her Ali Benzi’s problem.”
“Wait,” said Santos, realizing. He’s assigning security – I’m going to have to – go to the ground
? To eat street dirt?
“You can’t bring him up here?” she asked. “He’d come to see me.” She hoped. They’d been together two years until he’d… gotten the way he had.
Marder shook his head, but the airborne leader understood her problem with street dirt.
“You want to see Hammer enough to touch ground, he might give you five minutes. He hasn’t forgotten how quickly you wrote him off, Santos. Getting your shoes dirty could be a sign of good faith.”
And yes, she realized that. And he was a tenement boss now. People went to see tenement bosses. But… the streets weren’t just dirty, they were dangerous. Threats like sewergangers, who couldn’t touch you on the rooftops, were lurking under every manhole down there!
“Can you loan me a gun or something?” she asked. “Please?”
“You’ll have eleven soldiers protecting your ass,” Marder said. “Didn’t you say this was time-sensitive?”
* * *
Santos had never in all of her twenty-seven years been below about third-floor level, and the prospect of street dirt made her more than uncomfortable. But if she was going to work with a tenement boss – she bit her lip and swallowed her fears as, surrounded by musket-wielding tenement soldiers, she made her way down another flight of concrete stairs.
“Cleaned this building out good and proper,” said the sergeant, who’d introduced himself as Eddie Haskins. He was in his early twenties and yes, really quite good-looking. “No streeters left in here, you’ve nothing to worry about.”
“Didn’t clear the basements,” one of the soldiers grumbled, to murmurs of agreement. “Could be bogies coming up.”
“No bogies,” said Haskins. “Galvin, shut the fuck up and stop scaring her.”
They continued down the old fire-escape stairs in silence, their way lit by the flashlights some of the soldiers carried. Santos tried not to let the fear or the distaste get to her – you took risks to get ahead, and if Hammer was a tenement boss, she would have to visit him in the tenement. On the streets.
She wondered how Jeff felt about living on the streets now, as opposed to flying above them. She wondered how he felt about how she’d written him off so quickly that morning in August of last year. It had been the entire gang! It was everyone! There were first-hand reports of your being shot down, Jeff! She wondered how he felt about her, if he still felt anything. If he had ever felt anything.
And she wondered how he’d react to learning that his treasured collection of books was still intact. She’d hidden them before putting up the roof-open flag and inviting Hogan’s gang to take over the prime space. Slowly she’d been teaching herself to read them, because there was stuff in there about chemistry, her craft.
Something Hammer had said about how things in the physical universe followed consistent rules that you could figure out, and then game to achieve your objectives. And she could see how that affected bomb accuracy, which was a concern for him. Her field was materials. Most of what was known on the streets, or at least at the Airedale where she’d spent her childhood, was clumsy and rule-of-thumb; nobody in the Airedale’s chemical workshops exactly measured things to the milliliter.
What if, like timing the fall of a rock to the tenth of a second, you did get that precise with your reactant mixtures and processes? And measured them in some standard way, and kept records of how they worked…
She’d always been hired out, income to the gang, as a chemicals expert. Over the last year that had happened more and more, since measuring to the milliliter… worked. Not with nitroglycerin – even if the guild rules had allowed, she had not been about to attempt to make that stuff, or get too close to any of the explodier nitrates for that matter – but with plastics and oils mixing for the materials you used for glider maintenance, construction, and repair.
She’d raised the possibility, on realizing it, to her mother at the Airedale. Santos had never known her father – he’d vanished on a run over Jersey during her infancy – but that described almost the entire Airedale community. And yet every young boy grew up yearning for the glory of flying runs, and eventually dying on them…
Her mother was an experienced guildswoman. She’d eyed Santos’ careful measurements with disdain, then a shrug.
“Takes more time measuring it all out like that,” her mom’s boytoy Vaska had observed distastefully.
“But we’re talking same strength for two thirds the weight if you do it precisely this way!”
“Santy dear,” her mother had said, “we could measure and calculate precisely according to your recipes, but all that means is that everything would take far longer. It’s not like we can charge more than anyone else for frame struts or wing material. So even if it is better… it’s not worth the effort. We still have to charge the guild-agreed rates.”
And that had been the end of it.
Until this possibility had come up.
* * *
The streets stank. They sort of did, especially around the arkscraper trash feeds, from eightieth-story rooftops and eight hundred feet. But on the ground the smell was overpowering, and Santos gagged, stumbling and trying not to throw up. Sergeant Haskins took her shoulder to steady her as the squad moved out of the building.
They were immediately outside a trash feed, a huge pile of raw decaying matter that leaned thirty feet up against the base of the Washington Building. A steady stream of material was coming down from huge pipes that ended fifty feet up, for easily a hundred foraging tennies and streetgangers – under the feed, it was hard to tell the difference – around the pile to fight over. The air above was thick with flies and bugs as the garbage flowed in turn to the shopping carts of streetgangers or the much larger tenement carts.
“It’s flowing,” said Haskins. “We’ll be escorting some full carts back.”
Santos blinked as she saw the people pulling the carts, which had mostly started their lives as trucks. Decades ago the engines had broken beyond repair and they’d been removed in favor of human power for the usually-short distances they had to go. The people pulling them were scrawny, almost as ragged as streetgangers but completely unarmed. She blinked.
This is some real John Kiska shit, she thought but was careful not to say. She’d always thought that guy had been exaggerating for effect. No… the trash feed, the ragged workers, it was just like he’d described.
“Fall in on me, squad!” Haskins shouted from the front of the line of man-drawn carts.
His soldiers gathered behind him. Another squad was taking the back; Santos tagged along as close to the center of the road as she could get, ten- and twelve-story buildings towering up around her on both sides like gutted black skeletons concealing who knew what threats. As well as the carts of trash, the convoy included one cart – pulled by a slightly better-off-looking class of tennie, in that their clothes were cleaner and looked mostly first-hand – loaded with gas cylinders from the Exchange.
She drifted over to that cart, noticing that the dozen or so tennies pulling the gas-cylinder cart were doing so enthusiastically, trying to set a pace. And that some of them had weapons – shotguns and muskets – slung across their shoulders.
Hydrogen, she read the label on the cart. The tenement had made a special order of – a lot of – hydrogen, which was being brought back in a cart pulled by armed clerks and craftspeople; she could tell the type with skilled hands. What did skilled tenement craftspeople want cylinders of hydrogen for, she wondered.
And oh my God, this is what tenement people actually look like?
* * *
A tall, boyish-looking woman in a green T-shirt and jeans met her at the ground floor of a fortified, bullet-scarred building in the crossroads. There were captain’s tracks pinned to the shoulders of that T-shirt, though, and the shotgun-carrying guards at the Chapel entrance were watching her attentively.
“I’m Ali Benzi,” she said. “Marder says you have important news.”
Santos looked the woman in the eye.
“It�
�s for his ears only. Captain.”
“I’m his chief of staff,” the woman said. “Cleared for everything.”
Santos sighed.
“Will you please just tell him Santos Hawk is here?”
* * *
The Chapel’s roof had been hardened with concrete and thick rebar that the bombings of the coup had ripped apart into a messy, cratered tangle. It was a bad work surface but several people were on it anyway as Hammer approached. Four of them were holding a large black rubber bag as it slowly inflated from a hydrogen cylinder. Others stood by the coils of rope that had been attached to the blimp, under the direction of a darker-skinned, black-ponytailed woman in her mid-thirties named Sally Denonile.
Marder’s chief grounder turned as Hammer approached.
“Just got the new hydrogen cylinders in,” she said.
“How’s it going with this one?” This iteration of the prototype was made from pieces of cardboard-thin rubber tightly glued together. Thin plastic bags hadn’t been strong enough.
“This is iteration four of the third version. The inflation seems to be working well,” she said. She gestured at the balloon, which was about half-inflated to what would be a six-foot full diameter. Over the top half of it was a net made of strung-together cord, which the four holders were using to keep it up. “With your permission, we’ve made a few changes.”
“Tell me about them,” said Hammer.
“There’s no need to coat the ropes in broken glass like you planned. We can if you want, but it’s only going to add weight. And it won’t be so good for the rope, that glass cutting into it. The wind changes, the rope shifts, the glass cuts it, eventually the rope severs. Especially if we’re raising and lowering them.”
There was a hesitance in her tone and she added, “of course, we have the broken glass and can put it onto the ropes if you want. Boss.”
