Come the Revolution: Chapter Eleven

    I woke up in an unfamiliar room and it took a few minutes of shuffling around all the scrambled memories of the previous day before I got them into a sequence that made sense. I was in a cheap hostel in Katammu-Arc. It was charging four times the going rate because of all the displaced people from Prahaa-Riz looking for a place to flop. I at least blended in with the other Human refugees, especially with my recent injury, rumpled and dirty clothes, and floppy black fisherman cap. I paid cash and when the clerk started ragging me about taking carryout fried tofu up to my room, I shut him up with another twenty cottos. Cash is eloquent, more so than me.

    I’d gone to my drug-dulled and exhaustion-driven sleep with Marr’s words replaying in my head: If you get killed, I will never forgive you.

    It sounded like the sort of fake-angry threat people make as a token of love — if you die I’ll kill you. It sounded like that, but it wasn’t. She meant it.

    Marrissa was an only child. Her parents both died when she was about seven, leaving her to be raised by polite but unloving relatives. She had never forgiven her parents for abandoning her like that. I know. My parents and my only sister died when I was eight, left me to grow up on my own in the nightmare slums of Crack City on Peezgtaan, and I guess I’d never really forgiven them either. They should have taken more care, been more mindful that their lives weren’t just theirs any more. I wondered if Tweezaa, who had lost both of her parents, would ever forgive them.

    The point is, there is a certain type of abandonment for which death is an insufficient excuse. Marr, Tweezaa, and I all knew that, and that common knowledge bound us together in ways powerful enough to transcend blood and even species, but it didn’t give any of us a free pass, especially not me.

    So I had to get out of Sakkatto City, somehow, and get back to Marr and Tweezaa. The question was, how? I thought that over as I showered and made breakfast out of the cold left-over tofu. I had some cash, I’d gotten a good sleep, and physically I felt a lot better aside from the banged-up arm. Those were about the only assets I could muster, aside from wit, pluck, and boyish charm.

    I was in Katammu-Arc, which was in some ways the epicenter of Varoki-dom. It was the largest arcology in Sakkatto City, and held the municipal offices as well as most of the governmental ministries of the Commonwealth of Bakaa. The other six arcologies of the city spread around Katammu-Arc forming the points of a very irregular hexagon, the arcs linked by maglev rails high above the sprawling slums below.

    That really wasn’t my concern at the moment, though. My target was the uKootrin border, six hundred kilometers to the north. That sounded like an impossibly long distance at the moment, though, since I wasn’t even sure how to get out of Katammu-Arc.

    My best hope was that a good night’s sleep had done everyone else as much good as it had me, that people would wake this morning as if emerging from a bad drunk, shudder at the hangover and at the half-remembered folly of the previous night, and then prepare to go about their business as usual.

    I still didn’t want to activate my commlink so I used the room viewer to access the public float feed. A note from the management apologized for the smart wall being down for maintenance and offered a hand-held viewer as a substitute. I noticed it was attached to the desk with an anti-theft cable, the sure mark of a high-class joint.

    The first image I hit on the news feed stunned me: Prahaa-Riz arcology was burning. The structure itself wasn’t flammable, but someone had torched all that beautiful greenery which covered it. It made me want to cry. Prahaa-Riz was more than a cool-looking arcology; it was home, and not just because we had one of our residences there. Human and Varoki aesthetics were different, and Prahaa-Riz was designed by a Human architectural firm thirty years ago. There was just something Human about its look and feel. Maybe that’s why they were burning it.

    I scanned feed lines, the avalanche of images looking less like news than some nightmare scenario from a bad disaster holovid: Munies in riot gear storming Prahaa-Riz, shops in the lower levels of the archologies looted, buildings burning in the slums, and bodies — bodies everywhere. Thugs from one political faction vandalizing political offices of its rivals, Varoki mobs killing Humans, Munies firing on other Varokis — other Varokis! I never thought I’d live to see the day Sakkatto City Munies would defend Human slums against a Varoki mob, and do it with live ammo. The entire city had gone mad overnight.

    I tried to make sense of the flood of information, all of it distorted through the lens of the panic or rage or political agenda of the freelance feed heads interpreting it all. Everyone called them feed heads because usually all you saw was their head down in a corner of the vid feed, telling you what you were looking at and what it meant. Most of them were Varoki but there were a few other races and even a fair number of Humans.

    One thing I knew for sure: until all this bullshit settled down, it would be pretty hard to just slip unobtrusively out of the city. When Varoki mobs filled the streets, a Human like me couldn’t exactly blend in.

    There was a strain of news feed blaming yours truly for the riot, and that made my chances of slipping away in all the confusion even harder, what with my picture spread all over the feed. They actually had an interesting sliver of evidence: the vid of me yelling at the staffer who drew the neuro-wand, saying, “Put that away, you moron!”

    How could Sasha Naradnyo be the only person in the meeting to notice someone drawing a concealed weapon unless he knew of the weapon already?

    Would anyone give orders in such a commanding and confident manner to a stranger — or was it to someone in his secret employ?

    I’ll tell you something, I always know when someone’s bullshitting me: they don’t tell me what they think, they just ask these leading questions and hope my imagination fills in the blanks the way they want. I figure my imagination’s not there to do other folks’ work for them, but not everyone sees it that way.

    To be fair, there were some skeptics out there, most of them Human but a few Varoki as well. One of the Human feed heads got my attention, maybe because of her intensity, maybe because of her dark good looks, assuming you like your women hard-eyed and tight-lipped. I’m generally open to the idea, but in this case she reminded me too much of me.

    There is no real evidence that Sasha Naradnyo was the architect of this riot, and strong reason to believe it was simply a falling out between the mercantile interests of the eVarokiim, and the Varokist anti-Humanist followers of Elaamu Gaant. But nothing is certain, and if it should turn out that Naradnyo had a hand in this, he bears the crushing burden of guilt for all the Human lives already lost in these riots, and many more to come.

    While I wasn’t sure that covering all your bets was the mark of courageous journalism, I had to admit she’d summed it up pretty well. Still, she seemed more excited by the prospect of all that crushing guilt than in a less dramatic outcome. It would make a better story, I guess.

    There was some feed of Gaant’s speech about the über-rich being über-greedy — lots of people hailing him as a genius, although for my money it didn’t take a towering intellect to state the obvious. Rich people like money? Wow! What an idea!

    Besides, I wasn’t sure he was right about this whole mess being about greed, at least on a personal level. I thought it was more about inertia. The plot to strip Tweezaa of her inheritance now, the systematic fleecing of the rest of the Cottohazz for the last hundred years — that’s just what everyone at the top does. It’s not about money in any tangible sense. They do it because that’s what they always do — that’s what they’ve been trained to do. That’s what’s expected. If they don’t do it, their friends will look at them funny and stop taking their calls.

    Years earlier I’d made the mistake of thinking the Varoki were united in a single-minded quest to screw the living hell out of Humans. Getting caught in the middle of a shooting war between two Varoki nations put that idea to rest, but I still didn’t think the differences went any deeper than this nation against that one, this mercantile house against that one. Wrong again, Sasha. There were fault lines in this society which went all the way down, and now I felt as if I was watching them widen before my eyes, like the cracks in an ice shelf just before ten thousand tons of white stuff calve off and thunder down into the ocean. Where was this going to end? I had no idea.

    Something bothered me, though — something other than the possible descent into chaos and anarchy of the strongest and most economically important Varoki nation, or even the effect of that descent on my chances of getting away. There was something odd about the vid feed of Gaant’s speech.

    I watched it again. It was clearly made by someone sitting at the opposition staff table, given the angle. You could see several of the big-shots at the main table and across from them Gaisaana-la and behind her the looming massif of ah-Quaan. I played it all the way through and then again, and again. It was just as I remembered it, so what was bothering me?

    I played it again, and it was still the same, right up to that little gesture Gaant made at the end, that signal.

    The signal that told his accomplice to drop the jammers.

    Right. He finished his speech, he gave the signal, and the jammers quit, so everyone could start recording the meeting. So how the hell could there be a recording of his speech, which was before the jammers went down?

    Interesting as that question was, my problem still came down to getting the hell out of there, and I still wasn’t sure how to accomplish that. Assuming things were temporarily calm, I could try to make it to the apartment in Prahaa-Riz. The fires at the archeology had been external and there was probably a lot of stuff busted up inside as well, but our apartment was in rich folks country, and the Munies seemed to be protecting that sort of landscape. I had firearms stashed there as well as additional cash, a forged ID, and the access controls to my emergency re-transmission sites seeded around the city — highly illegal here in Bakaa, but put in place just for a situation like this, an emergency getaway. The retransmission sites let me use my embedded commlink while making it nearly impossible to locate. It wasn’t foolproof, but it would give me enough head start to get out of Dodge. But I had to get there to activate it.

    The question was how could I get from Katammu-Arc to Prahaa-Riz? With security high, if I took the maglev train or an air shuttle I’d have to do an ID scan and with the summons out there no telling what would happen next. Or I could walk. It was only two kilometers, after all, but it was two kilometers through slums which yesterday had exploded with riots, a lot of them directed at Humans. Maybe the rage was temporarily reduced to a low simmer, but I figured the survival time down there of one lone unarmed Human with his right arm in a sling and his pockets bulging with cash could probably be measured in minutes, and that assumed nobody recognized me as that horrible Naradnyo guy everyone on the feed was talking about. I wouldn’t have minded having a good skin mask right about then, instead of just a big floppy black hat.

    The more I thought about it, the more turning myself in to the Munies seemed like my smartest move. After all, they didn’t have an arrest warrant out on me, just a material witness summons. According to the vid feed, the Munies were taking special care to protect the enclaves of the other five intelligent races, like us Humans. The fewer off-worlders that got hurt, the less likely the Cottohazz was to get involved in Bakaa’s internal troubles, provided all the financial machinery started ticking over again within a day or two. If things got much worse they would probably evacuate the aliens, which if I was included would get my job done for me.

    Things could go wrong with that move for sure, but there weren’t any perfect choices. I had to play the odds, and, unsettling as I found that fact, the Munies looked like the frontrunners. My only real reluctance was in surrendering my freedom of action. I was used to calling the shots on my own, but right now I didn’t see many shots to call.

    Someone rapped on the door. I checked the time and it was getting close to checkout. It might be management wondering if I’d cleared out yet, but you never knew. I crossed to the door as quietly as I could and heard a low conversation outside.

    “Who is it?” I asked, standing well to the side in case the answer was a burst of smarthead flechettes through the cheap composite door.

    “Are Municipal Police. Would like speak Sasha Naradnyo.”

    Son of a gun! Talk about coincidences. I took a quick look through the peep lens and saw a Munie badge held up by way of confirmation. The English was heavy with the Slavic accent, common to the Sakkatto north side Human slums, but it made sense they’d send some local Human Munies to collect me. I opened the door.

    “You know, I was just thinking –” I started, when two Humans in civilian clothes and packing gauss pistols pushed me back into the room.

    “Hands up,” one of them said.

    My stomach tightened in fear and I raised my left hand. I tried to move the right one a little, but nodded to the sling.

    One of them handed his pistol to the other and then patted me down, very thoroughly. He dumped the contents of my pockets — mostly cash — on the sleeping palette then backed away.

    “Clean.”

    “Let me guess,” I said. “You guys aren’t really Munies, are you?”

    “Shut up, traitor,” the guy holding the guns said.