Come the Revolution: Chapter Nineteen

    “So, Captain Prayzaat, we’re in a tough situation here,” I said once the two of us sat down across a small table in a back room. “Much as we’d like to give you and your men shelter and protection, we have no legal authority to resist the Army if they come for you.”

    “The mutineers,” he said without any life in his voice. “Call them what they are.”

    I had a cup of hot tea and the Varoki police captain had a mug of redroot soup. He’d made sure his three men had theirs before he would take any. That said something about him. I looked at him carefully. He slouched in his chair, worn down, and not just physically but emotionally as well. Even his ears drooped. I think he figured he’d come to the end of his road.

    “Army, mutineers: they are whatever they are, and legally that’s going to be decided later, after the fighting is all over. What we call them now won’t change that.”

    He looked away, fear and despair and anger all working over his face, sending weak flashes of color across his skin. “We protected you Humans from the mobs,” he said without looking at me. “I lost men fighting our own kind to protect your miserable lives. We killed Varoki.” He turned and looked me in the eye. “Do you understand? We killed our own people to protect you. If we had not done so, if we had just let them murder you all, I do not believe the Army would have acted against us.”

    I figured he was right. Hell, I knew he was right, and it shamed me to sit there and drive a bargain for his and his men’s lives when they’d already paid such a heavy price for us. But theirs weren’t the only lives at stake, so I kept my face cold.

    His face tightened with remembered pain and he looked away again. “I have no idea how many of my men the army killed, how many are being held, how many are still hiding somewhere out there. All I have left are those three patrolmen out there. My entire life has come down to keeping those three people alive, and you talk to me about legal technicalities.”

    “Well, they won’t be technicalities when the Army comes for us and demands an accounting. But there may be a way.”

    He turned and looked at me and for a moment his eyes flickered with hope, but then he remembered who he was talking to, and his lips pressed together in distaste.

    “I will not break my oath,” he said. “I will not break the law. The law and the safety of three patrolmen, these things are the only meaning left to me For all I know, I am the senior surviving officer of the Sakkatto Municipal Police not in rebel captivity. I will not finish my career, and probably my life, with an act of dishonor.”

    “I wouldn’t ask you to,” I said. “Deputize us.”

    He sat up, looked me in the eye, his own eyes suddenly wide with understanding. The anger and shame colors drained from his face and his ears fanned out wide. “Deputize you?” Then he smiled. “Of course! But you understand that would give me direct authority over your armed fighters.”

    “Well, if you insist on being a hands-on commander, we may have a problem. See, I think you’re probably a hell of a cop, but this isn’t primarily a law enforcement issue.”

    He drew back, suspicion replacing the optimism of a moment earlier in his eyes, but I pushed on.

    “This is going to turn into a really tough fight, and it’s probably going to start any time now. We have a lot of folks here who have actually soldiered. Sometimes, like with me when I was a youngster, it was the Army or a few years in detention over something. Even for more honest Humans, the Army or mercenary gigs are fall-back employment. It’s second nature for us, you know?”

    He nodded reluctantly. Everyone knew about Humans and their proclivity for violence — ferocious as tigers, but very useful tigers. It was just a stupid stereotype, but right now it might work in our favor.

    “Besides,” I went on, “I have an idea how we can get communications out of Sakkatto City, even with the jamming. We can tell our story, and that includes your story.”

    That got his attention. “How can you penetrate the jamming? The Army’s electronic assets are far more numerous and capable than those to which even we had access.”

    “I don’t think we can penetrate their jamming, but there may be a way to get around it. But here’s the problem: if we start broadcasting your appeals to police in other cities to resist the coup, and to foreign powers to intervene against it, and we advertise the fact that you’re here with us, the Army is going to throw everything they have at us to shut you down, and we’ll just get plowed under.”

    He leaned back and nodded. “You would not mention this problem unless you believed you had a solution to it as well.”

    “Yeah, we dummy up an office and have you speak from it, claim it’s a remote site. What I got in mind they won’t be able to trace very easily. So let them turn the city upside down. Who says you’re even in the city? We’ll transmit your messages straight to the e-nexus codes of police, public information sites, and some well-known feed heads outside of Sakkatto, and who knows where they’re originating?”

    “Yes, that could work,” he admitted, “provided you can actually conjure your miracle with the jamming.”

    “Yeah, but it also means you can’t be giving orders here, or even showing your face. This is going to get very scary, and there will be plenty of folks who lose heart. If they think they’ve got a juicy enough bit of information for the Army, they may try to use it to buy their lives, or the lives of their families.”

    “You have a low opinion of your own species,” he said.

    “No I don’t. You guys have stacked the deck against us, screwed us over for a hundred Earth years, given us the end of the stick that’s so shitty, sometimes the only win that’s possible is just staying alive. We were always survivors, but you made us absolute masters of the art. Next time you feel like clucking your tongue at someone about that, take a look in the mirror.”

    We stared at each other for a few seconds but eventually he nodded.

    “Your rather insulting argument notwithstanding, the practicalities of the arrangement you propose are undeniable. I agree, provided you can actually arrange communication with the outside world. How will you accomplish that?”

    I leaned forward and put my good elbow on his desk. “Can you keep a secret?” I asked in a low voice.

    He nodded.

    “Good. So can I.”

    Once the outlines of the deal were firmed up between Zdravkova, Katranjiev, and Captain Prayzaat of the Munies, I headed over to my first logistics staff meeting, a necessary preliminary to getting part two of my plan working.

    The meeting was short because all five of my chiefs were anxious to get back to their work. That was encouraging. Each one turned in a resource list and outline plan, but in terms of accomplishments they were mostly still in the staff recruiting phase.

    I went through their priority lists briefly and didn’t see anything crazy, so I approved them and told them to work on that basis for now and we’d fine tune as we went along. I’d see what I could do about resources, but for the most part our philosophy would be to take what we needed, so long as we understood that our key goal — only goal, really — was to give the combatants what they needed to fight and give the noncombatants what they needed to stay alive. Nothing else mattered.

    Dolores Wu (rations) and Petar Ivanov (fabrication) took off right away and Doctor Mahajan asked Billy Conklin to stay after and talk about arrangements for an enlarged trauma ward. I buttonholed Moshe Greenwald outside the clinic where he’d stopped to roll a cigarette.

    “Greenwald, wait a minute. You were an electrician on a starship, right? You know anything about hard-fiber communication and data transfer systems?”

    He gave me a sour look. “Know anything? It’s my specialty. I ran power lines when I needed to, but that’s all brute force stuff. Data flow is art.”

    “Okay, suppose somebody had a local hard-fiber comm/data system already up and running. How hard would it be to cut it into the city-wide network?”

    He finished rolling the cigarette and then licked the paper before answering. “Impossible,” he said.

    Damn. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but figured I may as well get all the bad news at once.

    “Okay, how come?”

    “Encryption,” he said and then lit his cigarette with a pocket lighter, drew in and exhaled. “The municipal and national data pipes are encrypted five ways to Sunday, and nobody can hack into that stuff from the outside except in bad adventure holovids. If someone slipped you the security code we could do it, but otherwise you’ll never be able to read their feed.”

    “No, I’m not talking about reading their transmissions,” I said. “I’m talking about piggy-backing onto their fiber network and sending ours.”

    Moshe shrugged. “Oh. Well that’s easy. I mean, it’s illegal as hell, but these days what ain’t? The utility tunnel with the main data pipe from e-Kruaan-Arc to the capital nexus at Katammu-Arc runs right under Sookagrad.” Then he thought for a moment and his eyes got wider. “Hey, that’s some idea, Boss! We can get word out about what’s going on here. I’m not sure what good it will do us, but if the Army’s jamming the comms, it must be for a reason, right? Of course, you know that once broadcasts from Sookagrad start showing up, it could motivate the Army to wipe us out.”

    “Walk with me. We have to talk to Stal. He’s the one with the fiber network we may need to borrow. And I think I have a way around the reprisal thing.”

    We started walking toward the dry goods store that had Stal’s office on the second floor.

    “So you crewed on a starship, huh? Why’d you stop?”

    He spat out a piece of loose tobacco before answering. “Economy got shitty and the carrier I was crewing for cut back. I ended up on the beach for a year and a half, stuck here. Then a week ago I got an offer. In-system shuttle, back and forth to the gas giant, but better than nothing right? All set to ship out when all this crap hit.” He spat again. “Talk about pissed off.”

    “Yeah, I bet. You know any physics?”

    “Bissel,” Moshe answered. “You know how it is. You work engineering on a starship, you pick some up. You have to or you don’t get any of the jokes.”

    He assured me there were actually a lot of physics jokes, and so I asked him to tell me one. He said I wouldn’t get it but I wanted to hear one anyway. He thought for a moment and then nodded.

    “Okay, here goes. Heisenberg is driving down the highway and a Munie pulls him over. Munie walks up to the side of his ground car and says, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ Heisenberg says, ‘No, but I know where I am!'”

    Moshe stared at me and grinned. When I didn’t laugh he said, “I told you so.”

    “So explain it to me.”

    He shook his head. “Nah, it’s stupid to explain a joke. Either you get it when it’s told or you don’t. If I explain it, it still won’t be funny.”

    I started to argue when we heard the sound of automatic weapon fire. We both stopped and listened, and so did everyone else on the street. The sound came from the north, out on our perimeter, but the intervening buildings made it sound far away and harmless, at least to us.

    Moshe dropped his cigarette and ground it out. “So it begins, nu?”

    I looked around at everyone frozen on the street, their faces made ugly by fear. The hardest thing to get used to in Sookagrad was the unbroken sea of Human faces. Everywhere else we were the exception. We had a reputation for playing poorly by other people’s rules. I started wondering how well we could play by our own, how this experiment in cooperative effort was going to work.

    I took a deep breath and shouted to everyone who could hear me. “Okay, it’s gunfire. Get used to it. It’ll get a lot louder soon enough. Anyone with a job to do, get back to it. Anyone without a job, find one.”

    We started walking again and then everyone did. The firing stuttered, paused, started again, and then faded out. Someone had probably gotten trigger-happy. If there had been a serious push on the perimeter, a few bursts of automatic fire wouldn’t have been enough to turn it away.

    I realized I didn’t know beans about where the defensive perimeter was, and I’d need to if I was going to push ammo forward. It might be a better idea to set up ammo resupply points and have the fighting groups on the perimeter send ammo runners back. I’d still need to know the main concentrations, and what they were armed with. Ivanov might be a software wiz and the right guy to honcho ammunition production, but I had a feeling I was going to have to get personally involved in distribution.

    Upstairs from the store, Stal’s admin assistant buzzed us into his office. Stal sat behind his desk looking at the smart wall panorama of the northern approaches, smoking another one of my imported cigars. I could smell the cigar: the rich tobacco and just a hint of spice, the scent of the Caribbean. He better be enjoying it.

    I glanced at the smart wall. There was a burning ground car down there in a broad street which ran under the maglev tracks high above. A dozen people poked around it — Humans, so they were our guys.

    It occurred to me that smart walls in some half-assed poured foamstone building in the middle of all this squalor seemed as out of place as a crystal chandelier in a chemical toilet stall. Speaking of which, I needed to get Billy Conklin to work on setting up a bunch more chemical toilets, and quick.

    “Enjoying the cigar?” I asked.

    He looked at the ash on the end and smiled. “Da,” he said slowly. “Kuba Maduro? Always wanted know how Cuban cigar taste.”

    I decided not to tell him they were from Nicaragua. If you need something from someone, don’t start by spilling his soup.

    He looked as if he’d been deep in a thought trance and was coming out of it slowly. He turned to face us and frowned. “Who this guy?” he asked, pointing his cigar at Moshe.

    “Greenwald, my head of power, and an electrical genius. I got an idea.”

    “Da? As good as letting four Munie fugitives hang around in exchange for toy badges?”

    So he must already have heard about that deal. Given his line of work I could understand his ambivalence. Well, I was going to have to tell him about it anyway for this whole thing to make sense.

    “It’s related to the Munies. In fact, it’s essential, so if you want to scotch the Munie deal, say no to this, and the whole package goes out the window.”

    I stopped and felt myself shiver involuntarily. The expression “out the window” suddenly had more significance for me than it used to and I didn’t think I’d be using it as much.

    “Those Munies aren’t anything but a liability,” I continued, “unless we have the ability to communicate to the outside world.”

    “Da,” he agreed. “And?”

    “Earlier I noticed you’ve got a hard-fiber comm/data network. I got an idea how we can use it to get around the jamming.”

    He sat for a moment thinking. “Is why electrical genius is here?” he said, nodding at Moshe. He said “genius” the way you’d call someone a “smart guy” and not mean it as a compliment.

    I just nodded.

    He looked back at the smart wall, at the Humans down around the burning ground car, looking like bugs from this distance. He took a long drag on the cigar and blew a slow funnel of smoke toward the wall, watched it curl and rise toward the ceiling, just like the thicker, blacker smoke from the groundcar curled up around the maglev tracks above it.

    It wasn’t tough to figure what he was thinking. We could play armadillo: curl up, lay low and do the absolute minimum to stay alive, make the fewest enemies possible, and hope things just blew over, got back to normal. Then we could all go about our business same as before.

    Or we could play tiger, make something happen to save ourselves, even if that made us a bigger target.

    One plan required faith in things just running down of their own accord; the other required faith in the active agency of people and institutions outside of Sakkatto City which had never gone to bat for Humans before. Tough call, and I wasn’t positive my idea was the best way to go.

    He turned back to us and sighed. “Okay. Explain plan.”