Come the Revolution: Chapter Thirteen

    It probably frightened Lefty and Pablo to wake up gagged and strapped securely into chairs, and with a tiny comm jammer taped to the back of their necks, but I can’t say I had much sympathy for their predicament.

    I’d showered and changed while the atmosphere filtration system scrubbed the gas out of the air in the living room. Our security system had an option for lethal gas but it was a lot more trouble to work with. After all, you can’t just pump lethal gas through an exhaust duct into the outside air when you’re done with it. How environmentally sensitive would that be? So I used a non-lethal gas which promised to knock them out for two hours and leave them weak but clear-headed for at least as long afterwards. I’d never used it before but it performed exactly as advertised.

    While I waited for them to come to, I got my re-transmitters up and running and then commed The’On. I was a little surprised he answered right away.

    “Hey, pal, how’s the head?” I asked.

    Sasha! It is so good to hear from you. Where are you? Are you safe?

    “Yeah, I’m fine. No telling how secure this link is so I won’t tell you where I am.”

    Of course. I was not thinking. We were all very worried. And thank you for saving my life yesterday — twice. The vid of you telling the large angry fisherman you would not let me drown, that I was your friend, has made you something of an instant celebrity here in Kootrin. Have you heard from the others?

    “I know Gaisaana-la and ah-Quan are alive, or at least they were yesterday. I’m going to try to contact them next. I haven’t heard from Borro.”

    Borro is alive. I received a comm from him earlier. He is still in the city but trying to reach us.

    “Well that’s some good news. Listen, the situation’s pretty bad here in Sakkatto and my gut tells me it’s going to get worse. Everyone is losing control. I know you’re banged up, but you’re the only conduit I can think of to the Cottohazz Executive Council. You need to talk your bosses into some emergency abatement, and quickly.”

    In Bakaa? A frontier world like K’tok is one thing, Sasha, but Bakaa is the single most powerful political entity in the Varoki circle. The Cottohazz Wat is itself in uBakai territory, as are the executive offices.

    “More reason to get on top of this,” I said. “Face it, Pal, when it comes to crises, your Executive Council has a long history of closing the airlock after all the atmosphere’s gone. This one’s real trouble. I’m not screwing around. You need to break tradition and get out ahead of it, quick.”

    There was a silence on the line for a couple seconds before he answered.

    You may be right. I will speak to my superiors. Politically it will be very complicated.

    “Sure it is, but you’re my go-to guy for complicated politics. Speaking of which, I ran into an old friend of yours yesterday, guy by the name of e-Loyolaan.”

    The head of CSJ? Sasha, I assure you Yignatu e-Loyolaan is no friend of mine.

    “Yeah, he mentioned that, but I get the feeling he thinks of you as a worthy adversary, something like that. It felt like he was sounding me out, maybe trying to open a direct line to you. Any chance you two can find some common ground in sorting this whole mess out?”

    I shudder at the thought, but for your sake I will explore the possibility.

    “Last thing, have you seen any vid of Gaant’s speech, the one he gave right before the shit hit the fan?”

    I have not had much time to watch, but I believe I saw a segment of it. Why? Do you believe it has been altered? I am afraid my own memory of it is incomplete.

    “Not altered. The thing is, I don’t see how a recording can even exist, since the jammers didn’t go down until after he was done talking. I mean, that was the whole point of the jammers, right?”

    After? Really? If you are correct then the only explanation is a bio-recorder, a mostly non-metallic implanted e-synaptic memory system. They are rare but sometimes worn by vid feeders to protect their proprietary content until they can edit and post it with their embedded commentary. Some intelligence operatives are fitted with them as well.

    “Bio-recorder, huh? Okay, good to know.

    “So I’m going to switch to one of my travel cover IDs and try to make it across the border. With any luck I’ll see you before too long. Tell Marr and Tweezaa for me, will you? I can’t chance too many comms without blowing the encryption ciphers, and I don’t know how long I’m going to have to stay down in the weeds. Besides, I think I’m still on Marr’s shit list.”

    I will give them your love. Take care of yourself, my friend. I hope to see you soon.

    I broke the connection and leaned back in my chair, letting the news video play across the smart wall opposite me. The Munies were stretched very thin, were spending a lot of time and energy racing from one flash point to another, and their faces in the vids showed the effects of fatigue and stress. Some of them had been at this for thirty hours without a break except for food and stimulants. The strain was showing in their actions, which were becoming more “proactive,” a polite word for preemptively violent, often lethally so.

    Behind me I heard a chair creak. I turned and saw both my guests were conscious. As I had tape across their mouths, the only sound they made was the rustle of cloth on cushion as they struggled against the broad tape which confined them to their chairs.

    I rose and walked toward them.

    “Time to talk, boys.”

    Pablo struggled even harder, rocking the chair from side to side until it fell over, and then he desperately flopped back and forth. Lefty’s eyes just got large and he cowered back in his chair, or as much as the tapes let him.

    I had already prepped two auto-injectors and now I took them from the pocket of my slacks. I shot Lefty in the neck with one and then leaned down and did the same for Pablo. I tipped him and his chair upright next to Lefty, which wasn’t easy with only one good arm, but I managed. After allowing five minutes for the drug to work, I pulled the tape off their mouths.

    I always had pretty good results with the interrogation drug I used, nortostecine. It didn’t force people to talk and it didn’t make them terrified. Instead, it overrode all their fear and inhibitions. It made them relaxed and chatty, and it erased any concern about consequences. No matter what they said, they could not imagine anything bad would happen, which removed their motivation to lie. Its only downside was it made the subject’s attention wander.

    I liked nortostecine because it was a lot less traumatic than most interrogation drugs. Bizarre as it probably sounds given my history, I had developed an aversion to traumatizing people. It started before I died and had gained increased traction in the two years since my resurrection. That’s the real reason I left most of the field work to the kids, and for over six months had managed to come up with one excuse after another for not carrying a sidearm. There they sat over in my gun safe.

    “Nicolai Stal going to take your ass!” Lefty blurted out as soon as the tape was off.

    “Is he? But you don’t really work for him, do you?”

    “No. . . but would, as soon as turn you over. Now you ruin everything.”

    “Yeah, sorry. So why did he want me? Or was this all your idea to begin with?”

    “Nicolai Stal kill you,” Pablo said, his first contribution to the conversation.

    “We’re already past that Pablo. Now, what were you saying, Lefty?”

    “Lefty? Name is not Lefty, is Bela Ripnick. Why for you have electric locks and gas in apartment?”

    “Bela, don’t you think the head of security for the highest-profile non-governmental target in the entire Cottohazz might have extra security in the apartment he shares with that target?”

    “Well, yes, makes sense. . . . What you ask me before?”

    I pulled over a chair and sat down. This could take some time.

    It took about two hours, but afterwards I was pretty sure I had everything of value from them, including as much as they knew about Stal’s organization. Under the influence of the nortostecine Bela told me why he and Pablo came after me in the first place. A Resistance cell in the Human slum called Sookagrad had a price on my head for “Treason Against Humanity.” Long story, but suffice it to say they had most of their facts screwed up, and I’m a much nicer guy than they gave me credit for.

    But Bela and Pablo weren’t going to turn me over to them. Nicolai Stal, the guy they wanted to impress, was sitting in the back yard of about every law enforcement and military intelligence outfit in the Cottohazz, and in addition had to arm wrestle with a local merchants’ and citizens’ association. Stal couldn’t lean on anyone very hard because the citizen’s association was backed up by an armed Human separatist resistance cell, the same one that had a price on my head. Politics always gets in the way of business.

    Stal wanted to resolve his troubles with the Resistance: either patch things up or eliminate them. Bela figured I’d be the ticket to get either of those jobs accomplished. Stal could offer to hand me over, and either do so as an act of good will if he thought it could smooth over some of the rough spots in the relationship, or he could use the transfer of me to them as a ruse to draw them out and kill them.

    That was Bela’s idea, and it showed some surprisingly nuanced strategic thinking.

    So why did I bother with interrogating Bela and Pablo? It was always good to know what was going on, and at some point I still might have to make a deal with the Munies. Anything of value I could share with them might help grease the wheels of our future relationship. Grease is good.

    Once the drug wore completely off, Pablo began crying, a fairly common post-interrogation reaction. Maybe he was crying because of what Stal would do to them once he found out they’d spilled everything they knew about his organization. Maybe he was crying because he figured my best option was to put a flechette in his brain. Hard telling.

    “No cry, Pablo,” Bela told him, an order rather than an offer of comfort. Bela’s voice sounded shaky as well, but the kid kept up the façade. Sometimes that’s all you have left. I’ll say this: the kid had guts and brains, maybe more of the former than the latter. I walked around in front of them.

    “Look, you two, let’s get something straight. I should probably kill you but I’m not going to. I’m twenty-two and zero. That means I killed twenty-two people in my last life but not one so far in this one. You two aren’t really important enough to make me break my streak, and you won’t be unless you get in my way again.

    “I’ve got some business to take care of here in Prahaa-Riz and then I’m leaving town. I’m going to leave you tied up for a while but I’ll cut you loose before I go.”

    “How we know that?” Bela asked.

    “What choice do you have? But look at it this way: as long as you’re alive there’s a chance you’ll try to escape or do something stupid that could screw up my plans, so if I was going to kill you anyway, believe me, you’d already be in a couple big plastic bags in the back room. So shut up and count your blessings.”

    I left them with that cheery thought and went into the fabricator room to check on the body armor I was running out. I didn’t have a lightweight suit here; both sets were at the valley house. I wasn’t expecting any trouble but it pays to be safe and so I’d started the fabricator cranking out a new set before I commed The’On.

    The shirt was done but the pants were still printing. I ran the vacuum over the shirt and dropped it in the component washer. I’d chosen a lightweight suite designed to be worn under my street clothes, but also one that would print fairly quickly, because I didn’t want to hang around here forever. This version would stop a knife and slow down a flechette, provided it wasn’t a milspeck high velocity smarthead.

    I activated a smart wall in the fabricator room and brought up the software order again just to look at it. A one-time license for body armor, two-part covering torso and limbs, tailored to my laser body scan: three hundred and seventy-five cottos, about half of which was the software royalty and the rest was to the distributor, for marketing and product support. This was a fairly low-tech model, moderate protection; a really nice set could run you a couple thousand, not counting the raw material cost to feed your fabricator, and the electricity to run it, but that wasn’t much.

    Stal was on to something. His racket wasn’t just a revenue stream; it was a worm in the heart of the Cottohazz, the whole crooked set-up. The economy ran on decentralized fabrication so anybody can have anything — provided they can pay the design software royalties — with the intellectual property laws rigged so no one could ever get ahead of the Varoki in technology. Anytime anyone needed almost anything anywhere in the Cottohazz, all they had to do was punch up the software and fabricate it themselves, and every time they did the guys on top dipped their beaks. Folks who couldn’t afford a fabricator of their own, or wanted something bigger than their fabricator could handle, bought from a store, but most of what they bought was fabricated in the back room and it amounted to the same thing.

    Except in Nicolai Stal’s neighborhood.

    I wondered how he pulled it off. There were two potential ways around the system. One was to disable the purge code which disabled the software in your fabricator after you’d made the items covered by your end user license. The other was to hack the user license itself and change the iteration number. Pay for one item and then convince the software you’d paid for a hundred. Or a million.

    But it’s not as if that hadn’t occurred to the trading houses, and trying to crack that code from the outside was a sucker play. No, Stal must have people on the inside working with him, and that was extremely interesting. The one time I’d tried a really big data mining operation back on Peezgtaan, that’s how we’d made it work. After this current emergency was tamped down, I was going to have to figure out a way to meet this Nicolai Stal, some way which would not involve me getting killed.

    Before I plunged down into the heart of Prahaa-Riz, I wanted to take a look around and I was tired of vid feed. I opened the clear sliding doors to the balcony and went out. Right away I caught the trace smell of smoke — not clean wood smoke, but burning garbage, plastic, and something sweet, maybe flesh. Sakkatto City stretched out before me in the late afternoon sunlight, large columns of smoke rising from a dozen or more sites out in the slums and more little smoldering fires than I could count, all adding to a low clinging haze. Maybe because of the elevation I could just see more than before, or seeing it live had more impact than vid, but it looked worse to me, not better.

    The arcologies appeared untouched, rising like arcane monoliths from the clutter of the slums — untouched, unmoving, unseeing — but the slums looked unsettled. Among the flickering fires and through an irregular curtain of smoke I saw snatches of movement, flashing emergency vehicle lights, a waving banner, a sparkling reflection from a riot shield–movement devoid of clear meaning but fraught with implication.

    I ran my hand along the railing, still slick with fire retardant. I looked down to the slums directly below Prahaa-Riz, over a kilometer below me, and I remembered the feeling of vaulting over the railing of a burglarized apartment in Crack City, fifteen years earlier, and riding the canyon thermals down on a parawing, with a rucksack full of treasure — whatever the treasure had been that night. Did I have a parawing in the apartment? I didn’t think so, but I could whip one up using the fabricator. The problem with a parawing is you have to come down sometime, and no matter where I came down, everything was still going to be . . . that.

    No, my Peter Pan days were over. If I was going to fly out of here, it would be by a short-hop turbo-shuttle, and I had a couple people I needed to take with me on that flight. I owed it to them.