A Few Good Men (32 page)

She nodded tightly, but whispered back, “But you never know, so let’s get a drink?”

I nodded, and we started elbowing our way to the counter at the other end of the bar. This meant cutting in the middle of several conversations and squeezing gingerly past people in a clinch. I wondered how carefully raised Abigail had been and if I was giving her the shock of her life, but to be honest, she didn’t seem to be even surprised or curious. Though perhaps that was the unflappable quality Ben used to have, where you’d never know you’d caught him off guard until days, or sometimes months after, when he chose to talk about it.

I put my arm over her shoulders, nonetheless, to pull her past the tighter knots of people.

We’d just made it to the counter, and I’d ordered single malt, straight up, not bothering to give a brand, because they were not likely to have more than one brand handy. Abigail was ordering something that required explaining what a Pink Upright was—what did she think she was doing, exactly?—and I was about to cut her off and point out that perhaps she should go with a glass of wine, when a voice called behind me, “Luce? Ben?”

I turned around. Coming towards us, elbowing his way, was a somewhat modified version of what used to be a familiar face. What surprised me was not that he’d got a few pounds stouter, or that his hair had receded to the point that the pony tail that gathered it in the back looked like an afterthought. No, what puzzled me was that I immediately retrieved a name to go with the face. Not his last name, of course. If I’d ever known that, and I doubted it, because it wasn’t how broomers worked, it’d never got used and I’d since forgotten it. But he’d been known, in broomer circles as Birt the Bat, for reasons known only to himself and possibly his mental med tech, if he had one. Most of these names were self-bestowed, and there was nothing even vaguely batlike about Birt. Mouse maybe.

He’d been, when I’d last seen him, a cute young man, with emphasis on young, perhaps all of eighteen, but looking younger, with light brown hair, an oval face, and the sort of slim build that suggests growth will still happen. Growth hadn’t happened. Not upwards.

Strangely his cheeks filling in hadn’t made him less mouselike, either. He just looked like a contented middle-aged mouse who didn’t spend too much time running on his wheel, because that was for the young.

His expression flickered minimally as I turned around, as though for just a moment he weren’t sure who I really was. But then he nodded, as though to reassure himself, and said, “I knew it. Lucky Luce. Where have you been hiding yourself. And . . . Ben?”

But Abigail turned around and Birt gave me an uncertain look. I didn’t know if, in this light, and with Abigail in broomer suit he’d spotted the crucial difference between her and Ben, but her age was obvious. I cleared my throat. “Birt, this is Abigail, she’s Ben’s . . . uh . . .” I cast about madly, and decided it wasn’t any use complicating matters with mention of Ben’s brother. We tried to keep mention of family to a minimum in broomer circles, even back then when there was less cause to obscure our identity. Besides, Ben supplied in my mind
sister. Just say it. Easier to make a joke out of it. You don’t want seventy questions about my family. Even if it were safe. You want to stir the conversation
. “This is Ben’s sister,” I said, firmly.

Birt jumped a little. “Oh, then . . . oh, then . . . And Ben? You two are still together?”

“As together as ever,” I said, and my hand went into my pocket for the flag in its box.

Birt grinned. “Oh. Well. And you, that is . . .”

“Abby’s just starting out on the brooms, and I’m showing her the ropes,” I said. And I really, really, really needed to get her snort under control. She smothered it in whatever pink concoction she was drinking, but even Birt might notice it at some point.

A few minutes later, we were sitting at one of the tables, on the outskirts of the crowd, drinking and talking. Making up a history and a vague, general reason why Ben and I hadn’t been around wasn’t that hard. I told him we’d had to raise Abigail. I made some comment about needing dough and having taken—I dug in my mind for the most dangerous and out of the way jobs I could think of—mineral scouting jobs in the middle of old Europe, jobs that were done mostly on foot or broom, living in tents.

“Man, that must have been rough,” Birt said. “No wonder you look like you’ve had a fight with steamroller and the steamroller won.”

Like he looks much better,
Ben said, in my mind, his voice sounding stung at the implication that my looks were less than wonderful.
Exactly how many people did he eat to get to be that size?

I ignored Ben, because even in a broomer bar, people get worried when you talk to someone no one else can see, and instead said mildly, “Yes, but much easier to explain two men raising a young girl without getting too many questions asked, right.” Abigail, thank heavens, didn’t feel a need to either help or hinder with my invention. Her gaze, across the table, showed a vague kind of admiration for my imagination. Or perhaps alarm at the past I’d just given her. As for me, I wished it could have been true. I had a feeling roaming around alone with Ben would have been fun, even when it got rough. And raising Abigail would have been fun too. And, undoubtedly, rough.

Birt believed it. Well, what reason did he have not to?

Then came the obligatory catching up with what had happened to various people I could no longer even remember, and Birt telling me about some guy or other he was apparently living with.

It was Abigail in the end who stirred the conversation towards arrests and prison breaks, by talking about the Brooms of Doom and the break into Never-Never.

“You’re with the Doomers, now?” Birt said, looking over our suits with their red piping. “Good outfit. Not very active usually, you know, and people have sometimes accused them of being lightweights, but that break into Never-Never was a thing of beauty. Man, we didn’t even know it existed, and I guess it was mostly political stuff,” he pronounced political with all syllables distinctly separated as though it were an alien word and a strange concept. “But a few people I know were sprung, and, man, do they tell rough tales. Good thing for the Doomers to have broken them out.”

From there it was a hop, a skip and a jump, to talk about people who had been arrested recently and any weird events they’d witnessed, and I shocked myself by managing it as adroitly as Sam might have. Abigail helped. The pink whatevers didn’t seem to have muddled her wits, though she ordered a second one, and she was showing a marked tendency to snort and giggle more. I noted that Birt seemed to give her way too appreciative looks, which just shows you never know, and put it in reserve at the back of my head, in case at some point I had to give him the punch that Sam and Nat would have wished me to. But he never overstepped the line, and he might not even have been aware of the interest in his gaze.

Encouraged, he told us several long, pointless tales about the very best prisons to end up in, and the very worst ones—for a highly subjective idea of best and worst, considering the main attraction in one of the prisons seemed to be a really hot guard.

And then we hit pay dirt, with a suddenness that left me breathless. “Only Sanders the Snake, remember him, with the Buzzers? No. Wait, he was after your time. He’s a righteous flyer, nonetheless, never at a loss, and good in a pinch, you know.” And again, I wished that Abigail would control her snort, particularly her snort-giggle. “Anyway, he was arrested. Minor matter, nothing to jump about, just you know, a few kilos of oblivium in possession.”

If possession of oblivium, particularly in the kilo range, was a minor matter, then things had got far more interesting in the years I’d been away. Because when it came to illegal drugs, oblivium had been in a special category by itself. Most drugs were forbidden. Tons of things were forbidden in the seacities. It gave the Good Men a reason to arrest you if they wanted to for whatever purpose. But most of the drug consumption and possession was ignored most of the time. It was rumored, and I now knew it was true, that the Good Men owned most of the drug creation facilities and farms and controlled what got into the market.

I’d got to know this was true because the introduction of oblivium had been one of the
stabilizing
measures engineered by my father. Population stabilizing for one, because oblivium use came not only with a sky-high mortality rate—the fun and the lethal dose were that close together—but with more regularity than would be considered good by anyone but my father, it induced homicidal fits, which had the advantage of taking out vast swaths of other people who didn’t use the drug. In fact, at our trial and possibly in the media, Ben and I had been portrayed as under oblivium influence while committing the murders.

“So, he was taken to this prison, in Shangri-la. But he didn’t stay more than a few hours, even though they’d given him, like . . . two years. So, you know, I was surprised to see him back on the streets this afternoon, and he told me these guards came in and cleared the prison and turned everyone loose, and there was this high-security transport. He thought they were transferring the prisoners from Never-Never there, which would make sense, except he says it was a small transport, and he wondered if they only managed to keep like less than ten prisoners in. But then it was really small and he says maybe one. Anyway, it’s weird.”

Abigail and I traded a look. We let the talk stray to weird things in general for a while, not wanting to call attention to our interest in the prison, because Birt might be three fourths air head, but he might not. I was never sure how much of it was an act.

Then Abigail came back to it, by a circuitous route, talking about things that were named weirdly, and got to “That prison, isn’t it named something like Coconuts? The one that, ah, Snake escaped from?”

“He didn’t escape,” Birt said. By then we’d bought him maybe five drinks, and his speech was starting to get a little slurred. “At least he says it’s no trouble at all escaping from it, you know, because in some cells over time they’ve loosened the fresher assembly so it can be pulled over, and then you can go out through the drains to the sea, but the thing is, this time he didn’t have to, which he was glad about, because he had new, fancy boots, and he didn’t need to destroy them in the muck, you know.”

“Yeah,” Abigail said, and went back to her point. “Isn’t that Coconut Guard, or something like that?”

He gave her an odd look, then said, “No. Coconut Heights is the overnight lockup in Olympus, and no one has any idea why it was named that. This one is out on Shangri-la. I think it’s called something like Correctional Facility for the Rehabilitation of something or other, but everyone calls it Coffers.”

And then we had to continue the conversation for a while longer. Had to. Again, Birt might not be the smoothest pebble in the brook, but I doubted he was a complete simpleton either. In fact, before we acted on anything he said, I was going to have to double-check it. Because now I was completely aware of how shot through with my father’s spies and informants every place and every group was.

But Birt seemed inoffensive enough as he took leave of us on the street outside the bar. “Give my best to Ben,” he shouted out, as we walked down the street to the place where the roof wasn’t directly overhead and we could actually take off on the broom. Birt, himself, went the other way down the street, probably looking for another bar.

Ben snorted in my mind, with a sound like Abigail’s and I would have told him he was a bad influence on her, except she couldn’t hear him.

We took off and Abigail signaled for me to follow her and told me we were going back to the lair with finger movements so rapid it betrayed she spent a lot more time than I’d have thought on broomback. And there didn’t seem to be any way to argue with her. Nor did I know where we could go to confirm the stuff about Coffers.

Consensus

The Brooms of Doom had a much bigger and better appointed lair than we’d ever had. It took up most of a warehouse in the Deep Under region of Syracuse Seacity, so that Abigail and I just had to fly around a few minutes, then fly through the disabled robotic arms, before we landed and walked to the lair. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure that this was not on the bottom floor of the building where the Twelve had first gathered to meet me.

The lair must at one time have housed flyers ready for resale, one of those places that have niches on the wall, each large enough to accommodate a family flyer, with open space in the middle for special show-pieces and for the salesmen to walk around and meet customers. It was that big, and some structures in the corner looked like what would remain after those niches were removed.

Most of the space was open and shadowy, but there was an entire area partitioned with boxes, pallets, pieces of ceramite or dimatough, and the occasional blanket. Our lair had never got that sophisticated. We all slept in the same communal space, and if you wanted privacy you had to look for it in the shadows or around the edges, or, if you were lucky, behind a pile of something or other, usually debris from wrecked brooms and parts for broom repair.

Abigail led me to an open area, past some of the sleeping cubes. It was clear it had been set up as an eating area in that it was marginally cleaner than what you found in this sort of place, and that there were various seating arrangements. By which I mean that no chair, stool or pillowlike object was the same height, color or rough size. They’d either been scavenged from discards or bought from some tenth-hand store one by one. It could be either or both.

The funny thing is that the moment we entered the area, Abigail became the perfect hostess, asking me to sit down and if I wanted to eat something. As it happened I did. I was no longer twenty. She might have drunk five or six pink whatsits and look no worse for the wear, but after what must have been all of three single malts—I’d ordered more than that, because we’d been to five bars, but I’d nursed them parsimoniously, and when we’d left had left more than half in the glass at each bar—if that many, I felt like I needed something to soak up the alcohol. Besides, I was sure this would be another late night or early morning or whatever. It better be. I grudged every minute that Nat was in enemy hands and at their mercy.