Warlord of New York City

by Leo Champion

  “No,” said Hammer. “Good idea.”

  He looked up at the morning sky, wondering if there would be an attack today. Night was the optimal and most common time, but… the worst-case would be bombing during the Assembly, with the entire precinct gathered in the crossroads and everybody distracted. You planned for the worst case, that was how you avoided unpleasant surprises. These things needed to be ready soon.

  Ultralights, he thought, remembering the day in August when his old life had ended. Now he had money… but he didn’t have enough, just yet, to buy an ultralight, and personal luxuries would be a long way down the line for him anyway. These were the cost-efficient ways to do air defense. Experimental, but he suspected the experiment would be proven one way or another in the near future.

  “You – don’t mind us going away from the plan you told us?” Denonile asked.

  “Hell no,” said Hammer. “I gave you the basic concept and I’m glad you improved on it; thank you. Consider yourself to have earned a bonus.”

  Actually, he could take care of that now. There had been steady supply runs all yesterday, taking contract-manufactured goods and refined raw materials to the Exchange. A lot of that money had to be put aside for people’s pay, come Thursday, but the senior management was gone and things seemed to have generally worked themselves out from a plant management perspective.

  So he took out his wallet, which was full of crisp bills, and counted off five twenties for Denonile. She paused before accepting it.

  “Noticing the problem with the ropes wasn’t my idea,” she said. “It was Roker’s.”

  “Who’s Roker?”

  “That’s me,” said the tennie who was carefully guiding the inflation of the balloon from the hydrogen cylinder. He looked a bit better-fed than your average raff; actually, none of the people on the roof looked to be raff. He was a round-faced brown-haired man in jeans and an open hoodie. “Russ Roker, Mr. Hammer.”

  “Keep that money,” Hammer told Denonile. “Consider it an honesty bonus.”

  He flipped through his wallet and gave Roker another hundred bucks, which the man appreciatively tucked into a pocket.

  “Thank you, sir!”

  “Spread the word,” Hammer said. “Around here people get rewarded for that kind of thing now.”

  The hydrogen blimp rose as the people at the winch gave it rope, steadily climbing to three hundred feet, then four hundred from the rooftop; an ovoid black cylinder about four feet in diameter by six long, tethered by a rope whose far end was tied firmly to a bit of the roof’s rebar.

  You would be able to derive from the angle of the rope, Hammer realized, the strength and direction of the wind at the balloon’s altitude…

  “Keep it there?” suggested someone.

  Denonile looked at Hammer, who shook his head.

  “Keep it on the ground, ready to launch. I don’t want people with crossbows taking potshots at it.”

  Because he could just imagine passing airbornes firing at the nice target for the fun of it. It was the kind of thing he might have done in that past life, just like you never really gave a shit where you dumped ordnance when you needed to lose weight in a hurry. From the street perspective, he could see just why everyone hated airbornes so much. ‘Pigeon’ was not an affectionate term.

  People began pulling the rope, bringing the balloon down.

  There was a short conversation between Denonile and members of the crew.

  “Does as it’s intended to,” said Hammer. “Now make more of them. As many as we can.”

  Good progress, he thought as he headed back to the stairway. As he did, his radio buzzed; Ali Benzi.

  “Boss, there’s some airborne chick insists on seeing you,” she said. “Says she has something important to say for you only. Says her name is Santos.”

  Santos.

  “Boss?” Ali’s voice came in his ear after a moment.

  “Yeah,” said Hammer. “Tell her to… she come down all this way?”

  “She’s in the Chapel reception area,” said Ali.

  She wanted to see him enough that she’d dishonored herself with the ground, huh?

  He wanted to tell her to fuck off. It would be the simplest course of action. The best case was that she was merely the first of a thousand old acquaintances to be seeking something now that he was a boss. And presumably had unlimited resources, which was the laughable opposite of true…

  But she’d touched street dirt. For the first time ever, so far as he knew. Definitely for as long as they’d been lovers, she’d been proud of never having been to street level. She wanted to see him now.

  “Tell her to wait. I’ll be in my office shortly.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Diana Angela had spent the last two nights in the bed of a cute sergeant named Eddie Haskins, who had been in Second Company during the coup. Eddie’s elder brother Samuel – married, unfortunately – had been the company lieutenant under ambitious Captain Don Karstein, whose defection had ended the coup in Hammer’s favor.

  As repayment and political positioning, Karstein had gotten Samuel put in charge of the reassembled Fifth Company – “but that miserable cheap pigeon won’t give my big bro captain’s bars,” Eddie had explained to what he thought was a bored hooker or some ambitious girl from the raff.

  He’d fucked her with far more enthusiasm than skill and hadn’t been the most receptive to learning, but the enthusiasm had been enough and he’d gotten her off adequately regardless. As relevantly, from hanging around the barracks she’d gotten a sense of how the junior officers thought of the coup. There were unwelcome new faces in the officers’ club, people who’d been guards and corporals two days ago; from her best guess the new ones all seemed to be competent veterans.

  This Hammer was a practical man, if nothing else. People thought his airstrike had been fluke luck, but… she wasn’t so sure of that. Not when people also said he’d been practicing for months with the streetgangers and the airbornes. And if it wasn’t a fluke, it had implications she wasn’t qualified to herself analyze – but there were people she could ask, retired mercenaries in Times Square who were always more than happy to tell war stories to anyone buying them drinks.

  While the soldiers had been off drilling and training Saturday, she’d been scouting around the tenement – learning its gaps between buildings, its fire escapes, its manholes and especially its rooftops.

  And listening to what the people were saying. There were more newly-made Commune rosettes on people’s lapels, there was still plenty of looted alcohol and other spoils abandoned by the people who’d left. The plants right now were under caretaker management, the clerks and technicians told to work things out between themselves; there was a rumor they were going to get personal bonuses for efficiency. But some people were saying workers’ committees would be the big part of today’s Assembly announcement.

  No, Diana Angela thought now as she made her way into the area underneath the Madison Park Building where her weapons hung from hooks. The big part of today’s Assembly announcement will be Spartacus 2.0 getting a bolt through his face.

  She carefully took the crossbow from her wall, a beautiful lightweight weapon made from fiber and composites. It had been built, and customized for her, by a West Coast armorer from a famous family. Getting it across the continent had been challenging.

  She slid a single bolt into its tray and drew the string back lightly, just holding it into place for now.

  She would not need more than the one bolt.

  * * *

  “Jeff!” Santos breathed as her ex-lover stood to see her.

  The last time she’d seen that cynical face, in August of last year, he’d been on his way to bomb Hell’s Kitchen. Just another run, they’d all thought at the time. Had it really been… six months since then? She supposed, given all of Hogan’s presence over that time, it had been. She’d blown a hopeful kiss at him as he’d turned to leave, one that he hadn’t noticed, certainly hadn’t recip
rocated… and that had been her last sight of him. That routine run had been his last.

  Until he stood before her now, in a green and black uniform with an empty rank strap on each shoulder. Behind a desk that was clearly his own, in an office that seemed stark and captured but that he would probably make his own.

  “You have something to tell me.” His voice was cold. “Get to it, Santos.”

  “I want you to consider a proposal of mine, in return for a warning of something that’ll happen today.”

  It was Hammer’s turn to laugh. A thrill of apprehensive happiness rose up inside her, for the moment it took for her to realize that he was laughing at her.

  “Santos, you did not eat street dirt for the first time in your life just to tell me that I am going to be bombed today, did you?”

  She exhaled. Well fuck.

  She kept her mouth shut.

  “We’ve already figured that one out.”

  “So you know,” Santos asked, throwing more of her cards flat on the table, “that it’ll be Justin Canis, Billy Umashev, and their gangs. Coming in during the day. Probably on this building – there’s ten grand on your head personally, too.”

  Hammer was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “How do you know that? And what’s your degree of certainty?”

  “I grew up at the Airedale, Hammer,” she pointed out. “I overheard some, spread a little money around and learned a little more. But if you already knew that, I suppose you don’t need to hear anything else from me…”

  “Hold on,” Hammer said, and picked up the phone on his desk.

  “Ali, come in here for a moment. Bring coffee, if there is any.”

  The office door opened and Hammer’s assistant – is he fucking her? She doesn’t look his type – came in with a coffee pot and cups.

  “Ali, tell Air Defense that we are definitely going to expect visitors during the day today.”

  Ali grunted an affirmative and left.

  “Air Defense,” she said. Of course he’d have something like that. “I should have known you’d be ready for them.”

  “Sit down, Santos.”

  Hammer poured the coffee. There was sugar and cream, a luxury you usually didn’t get on rooftops – certainly never fresh cream. Santos took her cup with relief as she made herself comfortable on one of the office’s guest chairs.

  “Santos, you did not dirty your shoes for the first time in your life just to warn me of what you could have already figured I’d know was coming.”

  She met his eyes.

  “And don’t,” he said, “tell me it’s to see me again. That away-flag went up pretty damn fast.”

  Santos sighed.

  “There were first-hand witnesses of your going down, over the radio network, Jeff. Everyone else died too, right?”

  Hammer gave a single nod.

  “Yeah. Everyone else. Some day I’m going to get the son of a bitch who set that up.”

  “I’ll help you,” Santos growled. So much for that last shred of hope. “But what was I supposed to do, let some unknown come in and take the roof? Hogan’s a boor and he drinks too much but at least he doesn’t attract trouble.”

  “And yet,” Hammer said lightly, “here you are in my office. Does your lead know you dishonored yourself with the ground?”

  “No more than he knows about the books. Your books,” Santos played her trump. “I moved them to a part of the building where the floor’s cracked but the iron underneath is good – you know, on the southeast side? I’ve been reading them myself. There’s more than just physics in there, Jeff. There’s the science behind what I do. Chemistry.”

  Hammer was silent. After a moment she went on:

  “Precise measurements, records, similar processes to what you did with the rocks. Measure and record everything, compare the measurements, adjust known variables…”

  “You can do that with chemicals?” Hammer asked. “But they’re physical objects, I guess they would have consistent properties and relationships…”

  He got it!

  “Yes! And I’ve been developing recipes.”

  “The guilds rejected them?”

  “Yes.” You could get in serious trouble for discussing guild business with outsiders, so Hammer didn’t need to know why. “But people are going to want stronger, lighter gliders. Just give me some working space, Jeff.”

  “You know,” Hammer said mildly, “you could have at some point told me that you were conducting your own experiments.”

  “I tried to. You weren’t exactly talking with me, remember?”

  Or touching her, or letting her touch him… that rankled. That had hurt. She wasn’t sure she wanted to forgive that, but she could work with him on business.

  “Just some working space and materials. The space can be another rooftop. The one next to Marder’s would be fine.”

  Hammer was silent, looking at her.

  “You could have, at some point, indicated to me that you were more than an idiot-savant,” he observed.

  “Because showing off worked out so well for you,” she shot back, then remembered where they were sitting. In the end it had somehow worked out for him just fine. For now.

  They both laughed simultaneously.

  “Yeah, it doesn’t quite feel real yet. Working on making it last, though.”

  “Congratulations, man. Seriously. You know how excited everyone at the Airedale was?”

  “Doesn’t seem to stop anyone from signing up to bomb me.”

  They both laughed again. This was the man she’d fallen in love with.

  “Hoshi and the Marauders got to justify that rock-dropping and coordination with a real fight,” she said. “Must have been good to watch.”

  “It was everything I always dreamed of,” Hammer admitted.

  His phone buzzed.

  “I’ve got more meetings,” he said. “Talk with Lock about work space, tell him I said to accommodate you if we can.”

  Well, Santos thought as she left, that could probably have gone worse.

  She wondered absently just what the tenement planned to do with those cylinders of hydrogen. They knew that stuff was extremely flammable, right?

  * * *

  Hammer paced back and forth in his office. It was about to turn eight o’clock; he had an Assembly to present at nine. He had an hour to think of something that would satisfy the mob, since there simply wasn’t enough cash in the precinct to buy all the scrip back.

  “So the Housing Registry,” Lock was saying from behind his laptop. “We used to have Mr. Bragg and a Moncreve nephew in charge of that – retired officers, in charge of approving who lives in what apartments. Total salary for the office is about three thousand a week, which we’re saving for now. I’ve appointed a clerk to handle new registrations – he’s just approving everything both parties agree on, like you said to.”

  “Why is it our business anyway who lives where?” Hammer tersely spun on a toe and paced back the other way. This was clearing up cash, but not enough, not soon enough… He couldn’t buy back the scrip. But he’d promised something.

  “We need to track people. It was a flogging if you’re caught living anywhere you’re not registered,” said Lock.

  Hammer shook his head. “We’re not going to flog anyone for staying overnight with a lover. Or exchanging places to be with a friend. So people would have to bribe these guys to get their transfers approved?”

  “Bribe the guys below Mr. Bragg and Jack Moncreve, yes,” said Lock. “Who paid for those jobs so they could get the bribes.”

  For the right to live in their own places?

  He’d been used to owning his roof, as a gang leader. Absurd that these tennies don’t even own the bunkbeds they sleep on…

  And that was it!

  Mid-step, Hammer whirled toward Lock, who sensed the movement and looked up sharply.

  “Here’s what I’m going to tell them…” he said as he realized.

  * * *

  People w
ere gathering to fill the crossroads at ten minutes to as Diana Angela made her crouched way through a small forest of potted rooftop vegetation. It was a sub-optimal location because there were people on all the higher rooftops across the tenement. Not countersniper teams; they were standing around large blimps that were roped down, and looking up rather than at the other rooftops.

  She wondered what their purpose was, other than making her life a little harder. One of them, on a seventh-floor roof, was directly overlooking the fifth-floor roof she’d picked because of its cover from above. The higher rooftops, which would have been her first choices, were right out today.

  Here amidst these tomato plants – this was a good location. She unfolded and locked the crossbow’s arms and began working on the winch that would bring it to its full hundred-kilogram draw. She was covered from the direction of the Chapel balcony about a hundred and fifteen meters away by bushes that wouldn’t stop or impede the crossbow bolt, from above by potted trees and plants growing around stakes.

  Her implant cast targeting information onto her eyes – she was not ‘about a hundred and fifteen meters’ from the Chapel balcony, her left eye was exactly 113.224 meters from its edge – as she turned the rapidly-clicking winch round and round. She’d made kills with this weapon from several times this distance.

  8:55 blinked in front of her eyes as the crowd in the crossroads grew bigger. There was green-shirted movement, too, in the room that looked onto the Chapel balcony.

  Jeff Hammer had minutes to live.

  And then what?

  She’d planned her own escape, mindful of the unusual number of people around those things on the higher rooftops. They would look her way if they noticed movement, and they might fire on or pursue a figure running across the rooftops… but this particular roof, with its thick potted garden, would allow her to stay under plant cover most of the distance back to a fire escape. She’d get down there to an alley, where she’d loosened a manhole plug into the sewers. Let them chase her down there…

  As for the tenement, Diana Angela thought as people began to come out onto the balcony – it would probably go into the hands of either Don Karstein or Jacopo Benzi, both of whom had solid military power bases and no need to worry about placating the raff mobs. Hammer needed the raff; Karstein and Benzi, whoever won that power struggle, had companies of loyal soldiers to suppress them if necessary. There would be disappointment and perhaps some violence; it would still be better than the wide-scale misery of another Commune.