Windswept (13 page)

I tiptoed to the side of the door and squared off, cocking the cricket bat so I could score a six off whoever was about to break in. Cops? Goons? Goons
and
cops? That would be new.

There was a knock. “Du Marque Bakery, with a delivery for Mr Banks?” came a cracking boy’s voice from the other side of the door.

I brought the bat down a centimeter, then stopped myself. “What?” I said, then cursed myself for speaking.

The rustling sound again, and then the boy said, “Yeah, I have a dozen assorted pastries and some coffees and–”

I threw open the door, bat still cocked, and there was a kid in delivery whites with two canvas bags that smelled like baked goods and caffeine and love. Foamed milk spattered his shirt. It hadn’t been riot armor I heard; it was the kid’s cargo. He started and took a step back, then said, “Uh, don’t worry, I wasn’t planning on asking for a tip.”

“Who ordered all this?” I said, putting the bat down and looking into one of the bags; the gorgeous scents of cinnamon and yeast rose up and made my nose very, very happy.

“Mr Banks,” said the kid.

“Who?”

“White guy, really skinny? Said he had to run some more errands, and said you’d pay for delivery.”

I thunked the bat on the floor. “He said what?”

Banks appeared at the end of the hall. “Oh, good! Giesel sent over the food.”

The delivery kid gave me a shrug and held out his hand. I blinked up DuMarque’s Bakery and found a ridiculously marked up bill in my name, but blinked in payment anyway. “Where the hell have you been?” I said to Banks as the kid set down the bags and slunk away. “And what part of ‘Don’t go outside’ did you not understand?”

“It seemed safe enough,” he said, picking up the bags and giving them a smell. “Bread. God, I missed bread. You can’t have yeast inside a seeder, did you know that? Gets into the vents, mutates, does weird things with the engines–”

I put the bat against the wall, blocking his path inside. “Did anything that happened to you yesterday not sink in?”

“Padma, I was out for twenty minutes,” said Banks. “I got up, I was hungry, I saw you had nothing in your fridge except for a few almost-empty bottles of rooster sauce, and I smelled the bakery. How can you not eat there every day? It’s incredible.”

“Don’t change the subject,” I said, giving the wall an extra tap with the bat. “I don’t care what you and the rest of your friends did when you were Indentures. You do not know how this city, how this planet, how anything here works until you’ve worked with me.”

“What’s there to learn?” said Banks. “I’ve already gone through the Union Charter and the Co-Op structure and everything I could read–”

“What if you’d gotten lost and couldn’t find your way back? What would have happened if you’d gotten in an accident? What if one of Jordan’s people had gone out last night and blabbed all about you?”

“What, you don’t trust your own people?”

“I don’t trust
any
people,” I said, “especially when there are big things like money, jobs, and baked goods on the line. Anyone who didn’t like your face could have pinged your pai, found you weren’t on the Public, figured out that you’re still a Breach, and dimed you to WalWa. You could have been disappeared, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing any of us could have done except light a candle in your memory. Idiot.”

Banks looked at the ground as he trudged inside.

“Oh, knock it off,” I said, following him into the flat.

Banks shrugged as he set the bags on the table, then handed me an almond bialy. He took a croissant out of the bag, breathed in its smell, and took a bite. “You gonna eat that?” he said between chews, pointing at my bialy.

“I’m too angry to think right now.”

“Then can I have it?”

“Hell, no,” I said, taking a bite of bialy and opening a cup of coffee. The other Breaches stirred and shuffled into the kitchen, then brightened up when they saw the food. Mimi and One-Eye bowled over each other to get to the table, and the old ladies moved faster than hungry teenagers at an all-you-can-eat. They tore into rolls and slurped coffee, pausing only to gulp in air before attacking their next helpings.

“Ladies, I know it’s been a while since you’ve had real food,” I said, finishing my first bialy and starting a second, “but you need to eat slower so you don’t get sick. Giesel DuMarques never skimps on the butter.”

“Thank God,” said One-Eye. “I haven’t had butter in four years.”

“Or cream,” said one of the old ladies.

“Or meat,” said the other.

“Just NutriFood,” said Mimi. “That was rough.”

They all grunted and kept eating.

I left them to their carb binge and walked out on my lanai. The morning haze had burned off already, leaving a few traces of cloud in an otherwise flawless sky. The sidewalks steamed as the sun hit the last of the morning dew. It was going to be a beautiful day, which only pissed me off that much more. I should have been able to take the morning off, maybe enjoy a second bialy, chase down leads on more Breaches. Instead, I was going to have to spend the day begging.

I blinked up a link to the Union Hall’s transport line, and smiled to see Jilly had, indeed, gotten herself a provisional license. The smile disappeared when I saw that Lanny had stuck me with a processing fee, an expediting fee, and a Don’t-Make-Me-Do-Work-Past-Sundown fee. He’d also charged me for Jilly’s new hack medallion, which meant a total of one thousand yuan out of my account. I’d probably get it back in a few months, considering how much hustle Jilly had, but I still wasn’t in the mood to drop that much cash for a kid from the kampong. I texted Jilly through the transport office and told her to get here right away.

I also blinked up the news feed for the past twenty-four hours. There was one mention about the shattered window at the office on Reigert, but since neither my name nor Jordan’s appeared in the article, I shrugged it off. The local busybodies could gossip all they wanted; as long as there was nothing on the Public, it wouldn’t affect me in court.

There was also no mention of the
Rose of Tralee
’s crew jumping ship. In fact, the colony seeder only appeared in the daily docking manifests, which was odd. A seeder usually got a few mentions on the Public, if only because it stimulated a lot of debate about making sure the Union would have a presence at their destination, or whether sending ships Beyond was worth it, or all the blather that starts in bars and ends up in essays and bad songs. There wasn’t a peep of that.

There was also nothing from Evanrute Saarien. Four years ago, Dolly Jo Bialowsky, a recruiter from Underhill, rescued a group of Breaching air-processing techs before Saarien did. He responded by screaming bloody murder all over the Public, railing about how Dolly was creating schisms within the Union and that competition was the bane of a strong Union and how tradition was the backbone of a Union society, all polite ways of saying “Fuck you, those bodies were mine.” He wound up taking her to court, and the suit went on for so long that Dolly Jo went broke and had to go back to a Slot herself. I expected the same treatment for me, but Saarien, as far as I could tell, was silent. There wasn’t even a mention of his daily schedule of appearances in Sou’s Reach. Either he was laying low to plot some horrible revenge on me, or I’d thrown him for a loop by calling in WalWa. That meant I had some time.

But not much. I had to get this crew signed on the dotted line, and that meant finding them Slots. Or, rather, finding Slots for Jordan and her buddies so I could fit this lot into the soon-to-be-vacant Slots at the plant. As Jilly up pulled in front of my flat and honked, I waved and went back inside. Everyone had fallen back asleep, except Banks, who was absently chewing on a bagel while looking at the pad. “You know,” he said, “we still haven’t gotten to try any of that rum you talked about.”

“It can wait another eight hours,” I said, sitting down to lace up my boots. “I’m off to get you jobs, and then we can talk about booze.”

“Can I come?” said Banks. “They’re all going to be knocked out for the rest of the day, and–”

“Hell, no,” I said. “You can keep reading and eating.”

“We’re out of food,” said Banks. He pointed at the now-empty canvas sacks.

“Too many carbs,” I said. “See, if you’d stayed put, I’d have made sure you got a balanced breakfast, not an overload of sugar and butter.”

“Then you can show me where to get lunch,” said Banks, smiling. “Please, Padma, I’m going to go nuts in here. I need air. I need space. I need sun.”

The way Banks perched on his seat, coiled and ready to leap up, reminded me of a baby cane viper. They’re cute as hell until they learn that they have poisonous fangs. Still, if he was going to be a lawyer here, he might as well start learning now. Besides, with Jordan and Saarien keeping quiet, it would likely be a safe and boring trip.

“Fine,” I sighed. “Just don’t get in the way.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, hopping to his feet.

Down in the street, Jilly sat in the driver’s seat of her tuk-tuk, tapping at the wheel with her thumbs. “They wanted to take out my sound system, boss,” she said. “I told ’em you liked the volume big.”

“The bigger, the better, kid,” I said, hopping into the back. “You get squared away with Lanny?”

She tapped the laminated card stuck above the mirror. “Good thing my folks aren’t wired, or they’d have heard and hauled me back to the kampong.”

“Just keep your head on straight, and that won’t happen,” I said. “Now, we got a busy day, so hop to. Get us to the steam plant in Faoshue, and floor it.”

As Jilly pulled into traffic, Banks said, “So, what’s on the agenda?”

“We meet with someone who owes me a favor, and I cash it in,” I said.

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“It will.”

We edged through the morning traffic, Jilly’s head bobbing with the music. Banks kept sniffing the air, like a dog who’d been let out for the first time in months. As we crossed the Ivory Canal, he turned to me and said, “Why did you go into Service?”

“It beat being a consumer,” I said.

“No, really.”

“Yes, really,” I said. “I grew up in a free settlement on Vishnu’s Palm, and we’d see all the news and shows on our pirated feeds, all the
stuff
that corporate citizens got access to, and I looked around our crappy little house and said, ‘To hell with this.’ When I was thirteen I took the exams, got good marks, and signed an Indenture contract for forty years. Never looked back.”

“But you Breached,” said Banks.

“Because I found out how shitty corporate life was,” I said. “If you’re not backstabbing your way to get ahead, you’re flinching to make sure no one gets a knife in you. I got out of B-school and took a job with WalWa’s entertainment division right in my own backyard. I ran a stadium, the whole operation. Thought it would be safer, because no one was going to use it as a stepping stone. Almost got killed in a beer riot because my assistant was out to get me.”

“Really?” said Banks. “That must be a hell of a story.”

“It’s really not,” I said. “Remember the Tsokusa Blight?”

He nodded. “Ugly business.”

“Incredibly ugly,” I said. “Only time the Big Three quit fighting each other and worked together. There was supposed to be a benefit concert at the stadium, and me and my assistant – this woman named Nariel – we worked our asses off. I let her take credit for a lot of ideas, got her name out there, helped her get promoted in pay grade. But it turned out she was undercutting me at every turn. She’d call up vendors and cancel orders in my name, get contracts missigned. She thought she’d get ahead by clawing over me. I had to undo all this crap, order more straws and napkins, only to have her storm into my office and complain about the workload. ‘I didn’t sign my life away to do this kind of grunt work,’ she said, then left only to sabotage me more. About two weeks before the concert, I heard there was an opening in Colonial Management, so I figured if I’m going to go through this much trouble, the stakes had better be worth it. I put in my transfer and dumped the whole thing on her lap.”

Banks shrugged. “So?”

“So, there were riots.”

“Riots, as in multiple?”

I nodded. “I had all the distribution chains lined up, and Nariel was supposed to make the calls, do the followup, execute the plan. When she started canceling orders, she forgot which ones to re-up, so things got jammed, and she had to arrange for last-minute deliveries, all of which interfered with the beer trucks, not just at our stadium, but at every one on the planet. By the time they opened the taps, the crowds had been standing in the sun for eight hours, and they binged and things got ugly. Did you really not hear about this?”

“I knew about the blight, but the rest of it? Fourteen years ago I was still farming potatoes and concrete. All this might as well have been happening on the moon, for all I cared.”

“That’s where the worst riots were,” I said as we zipped around a loaded cane truck. “Vishnu’s Palm had two satellites, and both were a mess. Projectile vomiting in low-G. Nasty business.”

Banks shook his head. “And all this got laid on Nariel’s lap?”

I nodded. “Like I said, I had it all planned, but she didn’t do the ground work. She got busted back to a Grade Six, and then I don’t know what happened to her.”

“So you just left her holding the bag.”

“Hey, if she wanted the responsibility, then she could take the blame. By the time this was all underway, I was already a fishstick. Does that make me the bad guy?”

“Maybe a little,” said Banks.

“It was not a very professional, compassionate move,” I said. “In fact, I admit it was downright petty, but, Christ, people got promoted and demoted all the time. The smart ones used it to their advantage, made new connections, found another way to get a leg up. The rest...” I shrugged.

“Is that going to happen here?” said Banks. “Someone crosses you, and you leave?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “Now I get even. Take a right here, kid.”

The day did not go as I had planned.

In Faoshue, Manny Kreese, who did steamfitting at the coconut oil plant down there, gave a sad shake of his pumpkin head. No, he didn’t have any open Slots. Not anymore. Too much hassle.