Come the Revolution: Chapter Eighteen

What was I good for?

    That was a really good question. What I’d told Stal about my background was all true: I was a pretty good administrator, and a good judge of people’s abilities, but that wasn’t the secret of my success. I had risen as high as I had in the criminal underworld because I could kill without hesitation and without any genuine remorse. That is a much rarer ability, even in violent criminal gangs and the military, than most people imagine. Train soldiers to shoot and stick bayonets in dummies all you want. When it actually comes down to aiming at a living being and pulling the trigger, you would be astonished how many hesitate, or shake uncontrollably, or don’t fire, or deliberately miss.

    But I never hesitated and I hardly ever missed, and that was my edge. After a while I understood what that meant, that there was something wrong inside me, or something missing, but that realization did not change anything. I wanted to escape that life, wanted to become something different. It wasn’t lost on me that my escape from violence involved the single most murderously violent episode of my life.

    So I died and I was reborn. Not hard to attach some sort of spiritual significance to that, huh? But now what? What was I good for now? The idea of picking up a gun and discovering that I could still kill without hesitation, that that was still what I was good for, would mean it had all been for nothing, wouldn’t it? And that thought haunted my dreams like a dark reaper, waiting, waiting.

    I was twenty-two and zero.

    So far.

    Not that I had a wealth of time for introspection. I figured we had maybe a day or two to get ready and at least a week’s worth of work to do. Everyone in Sookagrad wanted to do something, but nobody knew where to start, and sure as hell didn’t want to take orders, so you mostly ended up with a lot of people standing around talking and waving their arms.

    I had an advantage: for that first morning, Nicolai Stal loaned me his personal shtarker gonef, a big bruiser of a guy named Petar Ivanov. Ivanov made it easier to get people’s attention. At a shade over two meters tall, and well over one hundred kilos of bone and grotesque, bulging muscle, he walked around in no shirt and very baggy pants tucked into low boots. With his oily black hair and swarthy complexion, he looked like something that had materialized out of an old lamp.

    I got up before dawn and had an idea. I scrounged a dozen spray bottles of bright yellow-orange glow paint and then, as the district came to life at sunrise, Ivanov started showing me around, searching for people who looked like they knew what they were doing.

    At the first food warehouse I visited I found a middle-aged woman of Chinese ancestry, Dolores Wu, arguing with the guards, trying to persuade them to help her move a hydroponics setup to the warehouse. She was painfully slender and took odd little steps from side to side as she listened to the guards, her hands gesturing as if to reinforce or sometimes contradict what she heard. But when she spoke she froze in place, arms slightly out to the side, only moving her head from one side to the other between sentences. I found her physical mannerisms oddly bird-like, but her arguments to the guards were pragmatic, coherent, and forcefully delivered. After a five-minute job interview I sprayed the front and back of her shirt with the big letters “LOG” for Logistics, and did the same for the two armed guards. Ivanov stood with his arms folded staring at them the whole time, so they didn’t argue about being drafted.

    The spray paint was their uniform and authority: she was acting head of rationing for Sookagrad Logistics, and the guards were her muscle. I told her to round up a work gang and move the hydroponics unit wherever she thought best, and then start looking for more. If she could find a reliable assistant, get him or her to work on an inventory. The guards at the other warehouse were under her as well. One of the two guards at this building said he knew them and he’d explain. I gave her one of the spray bottles to make it official. The sooner people started seeing a bunch of folks with those markings, the sooner they’d accept their official status.

    There were probably better-qualified people, technically speaking, than the ones I drafted that morning, but I didn’t have a lot of time. Mostly I concentrated on grabbing people with loud voices and aggressive attitudes. That’s how you fill a power vacuum: noise and motion.

    Within two hours I had a good start on a senior team, all of them recruiting work gangs to get the most pressing, immediate needs addressed. Ivanov didn’t say much, but when he did it was worth listening to. He would also take over fabrication himself, once we finished our morning round of drafting people into the organization. Despite his looks, he was actually a software guy and he knew his way around the hardware as well. He didn’t fit my mold of loud and aggressive, but he knew where every fabricator in the district was, who knew how to run them, what software was available, and where the raw materials were stored. I told him to work on finding a loud-mouthed assistant.

    I hadn’t listed billeting on my original to-do list, but Billy Conklin, a local building contractor, convinced me we needed someone to honcho space management. He wore cowboy boots under his work pants and a cowboy hat so stained, worn, and crumpled it was hard to tell what it was right away, and he sported an accent to match. I got the feeling he had a lot of experience convincing people they really needed things they’d never thought of before, which was just the sort of skill set I needed, right? He was smooth alright, with his feigned bumpkin act, but I suspected I might have to keep an eye on him. I have an instinct for guys who are so sure they’re smarter than everyone else in the galaxy, they always have a couple extra things going on the side.

    He was right about space management, though; we had too much critical material looking for a place to live, and would probably have a lot of people fighting for that space as well pretty soon. A couple of the outlying residential buildings would have to be evacuated to make the perimeter more defensible. Where would we put those people? Billy got a spray-painted jacket for his trouble and a new job. He already knew carpenters, welders, plumbers, finishers he’d hired or worked with. I gave him two spray bottles and told him to draft anyone he needed.

    I found our head medic on my own. Dr. Tanvi Mahajan was the director of the community clinic and pitched in with the doctoring as well. Her appearance stuck me immediately: well-dressed, trim figure, hair neatly pulled back, and face bearing the prominent scars of childhood acne. If anyone had access to cosmetic surgery, especially something as simple as this, it would be a doctor, but she’d never fixed it. I got the feeling she was pretty comfortable with who she was. She was also the only person I met that morning who didn’t seem flustered or a bit overwhelmed. She took five minutes and told me exactly what shape the clinic was in, what she expected would be the things they’d have a hard time dealing with, and what she needed to take care of it all. She got to keep her job with some new challenges. She’d need a lot more space for trauma patients, preferably adjacent to the current clinic. Talk to Billy Conklin about that. She’d also need to secure whatever medical supplies she could, and get Petar Ivanov working on fabricating more.

    Moshe Greenwald was my last acquisition that morning. Moshe was short, thick, and balding, at least ten years older than me, and his coveralls stretched taut across his broad belly. A hand-rolled lit cigarette dangled from his lips. The sleeves of his coveralls were rolled up and I spotted a tattoo on his right forearm: a big gold and red spaceship. Not a real spacecraft, mind you, but what people through they would look like a hundred or so years ago — a sleek torpedo-shaped hull sporting big swept-back fins and a fiery exhaust. I figured either he had a strange sense of humor or he was drunk when he got that ink.

    I found him unbolting the LENR generator from an abandoned Munie van. LENR stood for Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, what they used to call cold fusion. An LENR generator didn’t kick out a lot of power, but it was steady and low-maintenance.

    “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.

    He looked up and squinted at me over the forward chassis of the van. “I’m paintin’ my nails. What does it look like I’m doing?”

    “We’re going to need that generator you’re stealing.”

    He carefully took his cigarette out and balanced it on the hood of the van, straightened up, hefted the power wrench, and looked at Ivanov. After a couple seconds he put the wrench back down and picked up the cigarette.

    “I don’t know you,” he said, “but I work for Bogo Katranjiev, head of the Citizen’s League. He told me to get a working LENR generator and bring it back to his office, which is what I’m doing.”

    “Can you dismount that thing without screwing it up?”

    His face twisted in a sour expression. “For three years I crewed on a deep space C-lighter, engineering department. Then eighteen months I spent grounded here, waiting for another lift ticket. Seven days ago I got one, seven days! I was scheduled to ride the needle to orbit tomorrow, and then all this tsuris breaks loose! Can I dismount an LENR generator? One time I bypassed a burned-out power junction, ran carbon cable by hand to pump a SMESS from a half-gig fusion reactor so we could make jump. You even know what a SMESS is?”

    “No.”

    “Then shut up and let me work.” He leaned over and picked up his power wrench.

    “You think this is the best use of your time,” I asked, “pulling one little LENR generator to run an office suite?”

    “Not my department.”

    “Turn around and put your hands up,” I ordered.

    He looked like he might argue the point, but when Ivanov took a slow step toward him he laid down the wrench and did as I’d told him.

    “You’re gonna be sorry,” he said.

    “Hope not,” I answered as I sprayed “LOG” on his back in big bright letters.

    “Hey! What the hell?”

    “Turn around,” I ordered and I did his front.

    He touched it with his fingers, looked at the still-wet streak of paint.

    “See, now it is your department,” I said. “You still work for Katranjiev, or rather the Emergency Citizens Troika, but from now on you report to me. I’m Sasha Naradnyo, head of logistics, and you’re now head of the power division. We’re gonna need lots of it. There are solar panels, vehicle skins, LENR generators lying around all over. What do we need to do to get them concentrated, secured, and on a grid?”

    He thought for a couple seconds, looked around the street half-filled with nervous people hurrying here and there, trying to make their own preparations. He looked back and opened his mouth but I cut him off.

    “Not now. Two hours from now at the clinic. Between now and then recruit whatever technicians you can find. Here’s two spray bottles. Have an outline plan of action by then and a list of what resources you need. No telling what I can actually give you, but it’ll be nice to have a wish list. You got any questions?”

    He looked around some more and then nodded to the LENR generator in the van.

    “What about that?” he said.

    “It’s your call. If you decide that generator needs to be in that office suite, then get somebody else on it. But if I catch you turning a wrench anytime in the next two hours, my friend Ivanov here is going to break both your arms, just so you won’t be distracted from your real job any more. Understand?”

    To my surprise, he laughed and nodded.

    “By the way, what is a SMESS?” I asked.

    “Super-conducting Magnetic Energy Storage System. It’s like a big donut only made from superconducting cables. You know, no resistance, so you put electricity in, it just goes round and round until you need it.”

    “Sounds like maybe we could use one of those. Any around here?”

    He just laughed.

    Fifteen minutes later I stopped back at the dilapidated wood frame and sheet metal building which housed the offices of the Merchants’ and Citizens’ Association and was also becoming the headquarters of the Sookagrad Emergency Citizens’ Troika, which made sense as, of the three groups that made it up, only the Merchants’ and Citizens’ Association was actually legal. I wanted to check in before my department head meeting and see how everyone was dealing with my sudden promotion from Traitorous Running Dog to Chief of Logistics. I wasn’t sure what sort of working relationship I could manage with Katranjiev, or with Dragon Lady for that matter, but it was time I found out.

    As Ivanov and I turned the corner on the winding, narrow street a short block from the headquarters, I saw a sight which excited and scared me at the same time: a group of four Varoki Munies, looking a little roughed up but not really injured as far as I could tell. They still had their sidearms but they hadn’t drawn them, and they were under the guard of a half-dozen citizens, assorted firearms raised and pointed.

    “Let’s not scare anyone,” I told Ivanov. “We don’t want this to turn ugly. Those four Varoki could be very important to us.”

    He looked at me. “You like leatherheads,” he said, in his rumbling bass voice.

    “Most of my life I was a criminal, and I spent most of that time ducking the Munies on Peezgtaan. I got no love for them, but times change. These guys could solve some problems for us.”

    I tried to find out what was up but the civilian guards didn’t know anything useful. They were just covering the Munies until word came back from inside what to do with them. Three of the Munies were patrol officers, looking scared and way out of their depth. The fourth one was older and wore the rank stars of a police captain. He looked more depressed than scared — maybe resigned to his fate was a better description. None of them really wanted to talk to me, at least not yet.

    “Keep an eye on things out here, would you?” I said to Ivanov. “Wouldn’t want anything stupid to happen.”

    “Because may be more useful alive than dead,” he said.

    That was a very utilitarian way of looking at it, and there was a lot to be said for utilitarianism. But there was something to be said for being on the side of the angels as well, not that it was ever easy to figure out which side that was. I sometimes think that the cause you back has less to do with where the angels roost than how you go about backing it. That said, I also think some causes can stain you so deeply that no quantity of good deeds will ever cleanse your karma. So if you’re looking for simple answers, some universal formula that will get you through life with your soul intact, try looking where the light’s better.

    Inside the offices I found Dragon Lady and Katranjiev arguing about what to do with the Munies. They made an interesting physical contrast: Katranjiev tall and skinny, fair-haired and long-faced, the Dragon Lady none of those things.

    She was fiftyish — which was older than I’d have thought from her voice — and a little stocky, but she moved as if she was in good shape. She wasn’t beautiful, but I’d call her distinguished-looking. “A handsome woman,” people might have said once upon a time, or would have if it weren’t for her eyes, which were stricken and angry-looking at the same time, as if they had seen too much and now disliked seeing anything at all. Other than being a former legal councilor, the current head of a Humanist resistance cell, and ill-tempered, I didn’t know much about her. I’d at least found out her name: Desislava Bogdanovna Zdravkova, which as names go would have been a mouthful if my own folks hadn’t been Ukrainian. She was second generation Bulgarian like Katranjiev and a lot of the folks in Sookagrad.

    Between all those Bulgarians, Nicolai Stal the Russian, and me the Ukrainian, this was starting to look like a reunion of the Slavic diaspora.

    Zdravkova and Katranjiev both glared at me when I walked in.

    “What do you want, Naradnyo?” Katranjiev demanded. “I only went along with Stal’s idea of giving you a job because I thought it would keep you too busy to cause trouble.”

    “Boy, were you wrong.”

    “I imagine you’re here to plead for the lives of those four leatherheads,” Zdravkova said.

    “As it happens, you’re exactly right, although since the Munies haven’t done anything but get themselves whacked for protecting us Humans, I’m not sure why their lives would need pleading for. But here’s my thing: have either of you given any thought to what’s going to happen to us in the unlikely event that we actually survive all this?”

    “What do you mean?” Zdravkova asked.

    “That would be a ‘no,'” I said and she scowled even harder at me. “I heard you’re a lawyer, or at least used to be. We’re grabbing everything in the district which isn’t nailed down, confiscating supplies, ripping apart cars, demolishing buildings to close routes of approach, knocking new doors–”

    “Actually, you’re doing most of those things,” she said.

    “A distinction which will be lost on the authorities. My point is, what will the owners say when it’s all done? Have we got a legal leg to stand on? Or are we just a bunch of vandals and looters?”

    “Legally we’re vandals and looters,” she said and shrugged. “If we live, we can worry about explaining it.”

    “By then it will be too late. If we want outside help soon enough to make a difference, our legal status could be the deal breaker. But I got an idea. I know it goes against both of your better instincts, but hear me out on this one. Please.

    “I think I’ve come up with an interesting angle.”