by Leo Champion
“How did it go, Mangoletti?” he asked the sergeant as his squad lined up. None of them looked intoxicated in their clean uniforms.
“They don’t like us, boss.”
“That’s for sure,” said John Brasci. Hammer was trying to learn as many names as he could, making a special point of learning the names of everyone in First Company. They were the ones whose ultimate loyalty he really depended on, which was also why he was training them so hard.
Hammer raised an eyebrow.
“I think they’re all the equivalent of the old First Company,” said Mangoletti. First Company had almost all been younger sons, nephews and grandsons of old families. “Called us a bunch of jumped-up raff.”
“No fights, I hope?”
“We behaved ourselves,” said Mangoletti as the Lonsdale escort fell in around them, at a respectable distance, and headed through the dark streets toward the Bowery. It was about one o’clock, the production and sorting shifts mostly done – but scavenging ran twenty-four hours, and carts pulled by raff passed them. Other people, raff and clerks, were out on the streets doing their own business. They passed a cafeteria full of off-duty guards, a precinct store, a big facility with the odious smell of an organics plant.
“Nine blocks,” Hammer mused as they walked. “Seven thousand people, right?”
“About that,” said Karstein. “I don’t think they’re a threat, for now. Although are you trying to bait trouble? You could have made nice by promising to relieve Lock and forgetting about it tomorrow morning.”
Hammer turned to fix the woman with what would have been a cold glare before he thought better of it. She’d never flown. Her word had never been her life.
“The hell with them. That man was with me from the start.”
“It’s not a way to make friends, is all I’m saying.” Karstein brushed against him gently, their arms touching for a moment. “Unlike that hot little number in the black dress and silver heart insignia.”
Hammer smiled. A beautiful woman, who had been sidling up to him and pouting and practically begging him to make a pass at her. He hadn’t, because despite the makeup and ten pounds of jewels, she’d been most likely a teenager. And more to the point, one of the Councilor’s grand-daughters.
“Her interest can’t have been pure,” Hammer said. “Saying how exciting it must have been to fly. She was off the pill or something.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Hammer. Gangers are sometimes seen as a bit romantic, airbornes are seen as especially romantic, and you were an airborne leader.” Karstein smiled. “I know I wasn’t the only girl who dreamed of getting swept off my feet by a dashing airborne gang leader. He’d take me up to his roof, which was of course as comfortable as our family apartment or the Chapel, and have his way with me between missions.”
“The airborne life is seen as romantic,” Hammer repeated slowly. “I suppose I can see that.” Relative to raff laboring or streetganger scavenging.
“Territory is important to everyone but you guys. I mean, you fly all over the city, you go where you want.”
“We have our rooftops.”
“But it’s not like you’re sentimentally attached to them. Marder moved readily enough, when you cleared that building for him.”
“So did Hoshi’s gangs.”
“Hoshi,” Karstein said, “went from streetganger to tenement officer. His gangers are now officially tenement soldiers. They had an incentive to switch territory. Marder didn’t seem attached to his rooftop at all.”
“It was too bad he couldn’t have sold it to someone,” said Hammer dryly. “But no, rooftops are a place between runs, no more. I’d go all over town to see friends.”
“That’s romantic. You travel. Soldiers of fortune,” Karstein smiled and sidled against him again.
“People really see me as – some kind of cosmopolitan mercenary?” Hammer asked.
“Exactly, not tied to any ground. You know most raff never leave the tenement they’re born in, unless it’s for scavenging or the Exchange. Even we from the good families – I’ve never seen that big park the maps say is in the middle of the island,” she said.
“Central Park,” said Hammer. “It’s overgrown jungle these days. Tribes raid out of there – the Airedale directly overlooks it, they were a nuisance sometimes.”
“You must have flown over it a thousand times.”
“Less than you’d think. When you’re an airborne your life revolves around outtakes and lift. Fly too long around where there’s no outtakes and you might go down for good,” he said. He shuddered as he remembered a couple of close shaves he’d had in that regard, when the wind changed. Just the act of flying could kill you sometimes, but Hammer had loved it anyway.
“Sounds like you had a good time,” he said to her, changing the subject as they reached the Bowery. The Lonsdale escorts signaled for the gate to open onto the wide dark free road, and their sergeant gave a formal salute. Karstein responded in kind immediately, Hammer on her cue a moment later. There was a brief pause as Mangoletti’s escort squad unslung their muskets and prepared, just in case there were sewergangers or something lurking.
Karstein grinned. “Thank you for bringing me along. I learned a lot, too.”
So did I. We from the good families, huh?
He was curious, and the Cowans had been right – tact wasn’t a skill airbornes had. Dagger had been blunt as a brick.
“What did your parents do to get promoted, Karstein?”
The woman froze. Suddenly her warmth was ice.
“Fought, Hammer. On the ground. How did you know… oh.”
“The Cowans told me. They seemed to find it amusing.” Tact went both ways and he was legitimately interested.
“They would. That man’s second cousin is Intendancy. One circle, Associate Under.” Karstein was practically spitting.
“Tiny fish in a huge pond,” Hammer said dismissively. He knew that much from the telenovelas. “What’s that do for their tenement?”
“Her family has been helping O’Grady’s ancestors since the Eight Days War. You don’t care?”
“I asked my chief of intelligence, and the commander of my only company that can sustainably fire three volleys a minute, a question.”
Second Company had the same mix of about forty percent raff, clerk, and streetganger recruits and born guards, as the others except for First, which was all but for the officers, raff and streetganger recruits. The others were learning and getting better. Second had already gotten good. The constant drill was their troops’ problem, not Hammer’s. The ammunition cost was their commander’s, mostly.
“Yes, my parents were born raff. You don’t care?”
“I lost count of the number of times I had ‘upjumped ganger’ thrown in my face tonight,” said Hammer. “You might think of airbornes as romantic. I heard ‘pigeon scum’ implied a couple of times as well.”
At the West Bowery intersection, Lieutenant Haskins saluted as the gate opened.
“Staying up for us, Haskins?” It wasn’t usually the job of company commanders to man guard posts at this hour. To inspect them yes, but Haskins had clearly been waiting.
“Just making sure, boss. One of the scavenging escort squads reported movement around the subway entrance. Raiders maybe out tonight and we don’t know for sure about all the manholes on the free road.”
Good point. But, “Well, we’re safe now. You can go to bed.”
Hammer turned back to Karstein.
“You honestly think I consider it a problem that your parents got into the guard the hard way? And you made lieutenant?”
“Don helped with that. He saved John Moncreve’s life during the Association War. He was a corporal in acting charge of what was left of his squad when Midtowners cut the force off – this was before the No-Go Zone rules were set up, the tenement were Downtown levies.
“I’ll spare you the story – you can ask him, it’s his accomplishment – but it ended with my half-brother dueli
ng and killing a guy they say was a ranking made man. He got his limp that way, saved the number two’s ass – Moncreve’s second son, Roger was his third, died in the same fight – and, well, that’s apparently all a second-generation guard needs to get into the officer class. Saving a number two’s life at the cost of a permanent injury.”
“I’ve had my concerns about you, Karstein. Both of you.”
“I know. Why do you think we’re bankrupting my family – ask Lock, you think powder’s cheap – to bring Second Company up to speed?”
“Yeah, I wasn’t sure if you had different motivations.” Because the family had turned their backs on the Reverend.
“I know.” Karstein’s lip curled. “Boss, I… was making a pass at you if you couldn’t tell. Now you’ll think I’m trying to fuck my way into favor. I am not going to do that.”
“You won’t owe me anything but the duty you already owe my tenement and my people. Come upstairs if you want. I wouldn’t mind company myself tonight. Your call.”
Hammer turned toward the Chapel, increasing his walking speed to see if she’d follow.
After a few steps she did.
* * *
Afterwards, as the sun rose, Kimberli turned to him in bed.
“Remember in the meeting when you were talking production appointments with Lock,” she asked, “and you said, I quote, ‘we are no longer running things for the benefit of the old families’? And my half-brother enthusiastically agreed?”
“Yes,” said Hammer. He’d been suspicious of that enthusiasm.
“Why didn’t you think we meant it?”
Hammer smiled. Tenement bosses, he supposed, had a different kind of pillow talk.
He didn’t mind.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Diana Angela’s maternal grandfather’s parents had been successful tech entrepreneurs in the mid-twenty-first century, and her childhood home had been in the family since the Park Ninetieth Building had been constructed on Fifth Avenue in the 2060s, as radiation clouds had circled the planet in the five-year-winter aftermath of the Eight Days War. Back then you’d been allowed to make small external changes to spaces you owned; some people had even had balconies constructed, although all but the faintest traces of those had been gone by the turn of the century.
What Paul Eastbrook had added to his hundred-and-sixty-first and -second floor mansion had been a window in the central atrium, a huge two-story window on a slight angle, just a few degrees, downwards. You couldn’t look at the window and not see down toward wild, abandoned Central Park and the industrial slums below the West Side scrapers.
She’d grown up in this massive two-story apartment, the trust requiring that it stay in the family, and many hours from childhood onwards had been spent in the window she now stood looking out of. She would have liked to have known her great-grandparents, she thought. They had not just made fortunes, but they had been of the last generation on Earth to actually do something constructive, before material zero-scarcity had been achieved with asteroid mining, modern AIs, fabricator chains and molecular compilators.
“Di!” came the voice of her mother. “Dinner’s ready!”
Diana gave one last look at Central Park, shadowed and thickly overgrown but not dark because of the arkscraper light. It was a clear night, but that meant nothing; the arks’ light pollution meant you could barely see the moon from the city, and the lights of the cities on the moon. Cities she wished she could visit or live in, and she hated her world for refusing her permission to leave.
Then she turned around, pushing that unhealthy thought from her mind; thinking about that would only make her miserable. It was about nine o’clock on Monday night, her weekly dinner with family.
Her parents had split up when Diana Angela was fourteen and Annabelle eleven, mostly because it had become unfashionable for marriages to last too long. But George Smythe and Madeline Eastbrook had remained close friends. She didn’t want to think about her parents having foursomes, but she was fairly sure that that had happened too. Thankfully they had both been prudish enough to lock that social media content from their children.
The house – that was how she thought of it – was well-appointed and familiar, the place she had lived from birth until college. At the round dining room table her parents were seated with Annabelle and her fiancé Boris. They waited for her to sit down at the place she’d occupied at this table at every dinner since she’d been in a high-chair.
Her parents were both in their sixties, her father a well-preserved sixty-seven and her mother a gracefully aging sixty-three, grey streaks beginning to appear in her brown hair. Annabelle was three years younger than Diana, in a tan business suit with an open silver circle on each shoulder. As the family’s second child, she’d inherit her parents’ lesser rank, Associate Senior.
Boris was in his mid-thirties and blond with a handsome face and a muscular build. Two closed circles were on each of his shoulders, Under Second. He supervised a department of people who reviewed and authorized financial AIs’ decisions in an accounts payable office, a largely make-work job.
Pretty much nothing that required real math or engineering skills – nothing that could be externally validated as objectively true or false – rated above squares. Executives, went the Intendancy’s credo, existed to make subjective virtue-based judgment calls that a computer could not be programmed to do. Or certainly, according to one of the corporation-state’s fundamental premises for existence, things that a computer shouldn’t be able to do. Only humans were qualified to run, or attend, equal opportunity meetings and virtue evaluation hearings.
AIs might make fine accountants, but they were not allowed to perform Intendancy busy-work. Those jobs would and could never be automated away. Likewise most of the hashes-wearing service roles – it would be technologically easy to build robots better than any waiter or hairdresser, but then the circles-, wreaths-, or stars-adorned executives wouldn’t have the power trip of bossing around fellow humans.
People began to dig into the roast on the plates in front of them, which her parents had cooked themselves. There was something more authentic, they said, about eating something your own labor had gone into, than something a machine had slapped together. And her parents enjoyed it, apparently.
“Work today?” Diana Angela asked her dad, who was a semi-retired librarian for Google. He was welcome to keep those three wreaths for as long as he lived, so far as DA was concerned – she’d made it very clear she was more interested in her cover hobbies of fitness and travel, than the rank and social credit that would come of inheriting an upper-grade vice-presidency at one of the most senior companies of the Intendancy. There was Uncle Hugo’s family trust fund if she ever needed more money… but Intendancy augmentations were restricted to need only, and simply looking too closely at the application process might have exposed her. For personal stuff she spent well below her means anyhow. Gym and dojo memberships were cheap.
“Just the afternoon,” he said. “Tuning new AI iterations. It’s a constant arms race, you know, as the social maladaptives find ways to get around the listing parameters.”
The First Amendment applied of course to everything noncommercial that the United Nations, Speaker case law, or the Intendancy’s virtue review committees hadn’t deemed hate speech, but there was no requirement that all permitted speech be visible or easily findable, or equally so. Her father’s department was responsible for de-prioritizing search results whose content was deemed socially unconstructive.
“Dissidents do that, you know,” Diana forced a thin smile. Back in the day she’d run with a group of urban-exploring thought dissidents. They’d helped her form her philosophy and confirmed that she was not insane to hate her society, but it had been a long time ago.
“Punk kids,” said her father. “Some of them seem to do it just for the fun of it. It won’t look good on their records, when they grow up.”
“Yeah,” Diana agreed. She had, officially, grown up after al
l. After the sewer vermin had killed Ian and she’d turned toward vengeance, which had led to her second life on the streets, she’d publicly damned and disavowed that old crowd. The greater your private vice, the more public virtue you needed to show to avoid notice. Sometimes she wondered what had happened to the old denizens of the Unsafe Space. It wouldn’t exactly be safe to google their names, but she did wonder.
She took another bite of her chicken. It was vat meat, but had been grown as a full chicken except for the head and feathers. The technology was cheaper and had been ruled more humane than raising animals for slaughter, with all the inefficiencies that involved.
“Ooh!” said Annabelle. “Our big ball was Friday afternoon!”
“We actually went down to the streets,” Boris added.
“Oh my God,” her mom said. “You actually went down there? Isn’t it – dangerous?”
“It was a bit scary,” Boris agreed. “There were people with real guns and everything. Some of the street people had weapons, too. They kill each other down there, you know.”
“Was anyone killed while you were there?” Diana’s mother asked.
Annabelle and Boris looked at each other, then shook their heads.
“No,” Boris said. “We don’t think so, anyway. But they might have been. Our guards were very alert, just in case.”
You rode in an armored, escorted bus three blocks from an exit of the Independent Hotel to the Library, Diana thought, wanting to roll her eyes. Through the center of Times Square in the daytime.
“We got to meet tenement leaders from all across the city,” Annabelle said. “It was something called the Association Ball, in Times Square.”
“What were they like?” Diana’s father asked. “The tenement people you met?”
Annabelle giggled.
“They’re so quaint. They were all really trying to impress us, so they put on their very best clothes and all the bling they could find. And they decorate themselves with imaginary rank!”
