Like a Boss (2 page)

I rounded the corner onto Beda Street, where the Red Line bus stop squatted between a strip club and a library. The bus system had started a year ago. A few Breaches had come shimmying down the cable in a loaded cargo can, hiding among the flatpacked buses. Rather than give the parts back, the Union confiscated and built them out. Hacking the control software turned out to be a pain, leading to the occasional bus stopping dead in its tracks. Still, it meant more people could get to and from the kampong, and it was cheaper for me than hiring a tuk-tuk, even though Jilly’s company still cut me the Friends And Family rate.

The Red Line went all the way from Brushhead to Tanque, the Ward on the far edge of town where the late Estella Tonggow had set up the Old Windswept Distillery. She had been able to cruise there and back in an armored limousine. I had to settle for the bus. Though, as I approached the stop, I might not have been able to settle even for that.

The stop was little more than a caneplas box surrounding a pair of benches. Three sunburned people in ragged clothes snoozed on the benches, their bags at their feet. A scrawled sign glued to the side of the shelter said NO SERVICE TODAY DUE TO. The rest of the sign had been torn away, and the greasy fingerprints on the paper left the reasons to my imagination. I blinked up the Public and saw no notices about a system stoppage. “Excuse me,” I said to the people, “what’s up with the bus?”

One of them, a woman with a massive salt-and-pepper plait, opened her eyes and said, “What? You never ride a bus before?”

I took a step back. Her eyes were hard and cold, like a shark on the hunt. I peeled the sign off the shelter and held it up. “I don’t think any of us are taking this bus.”

She squinted at the sign and groaned. “Aw, spit. That must have happened after we got here.”

“How long ago was that?”

Now she squinted at me. “What’s it to you?”

I gave her a side-eyed look. Not everyone in Santee City was a friendly, happy, we’re-all-in-it-together type. But this fast pivot toward aggression felt off. She didn’t look or smell drunk, but I felt my guts shrivel the way they always did before Last Call. I held up my hands and gave her a gentle smile with no teeth. “Just wondering. I need this bus to get to work.”

She dialed back the squint a little. “Yeah. Us, too.” She nudged the other two people awake. “Hey. Our ride’s not coming.”

“Fuggoff,” said one of them, a man whose face was more beard than skin.

The woman with the plait walloped him upside the head. “Don’t talk to me that way, jackass.”

The third, another woman whose hair was short and slicked back, shoved both of them. “All of you shut up. I’m tryna sleep before our ride gets here.”

“It’s not
coming
,” said Plait Woman. I blinked her face into the Public so I could get her name, but she didn’t register. None of them did. That was weird as hell. They all had Union fists under their old Indenture tattoos. These people didn’t just fall out of orbit into the middle of Brushhead.

“It will,” said Short And Slicked. “Just wait.”

“We’ve been waiting all
day
,” said Beard Face.

“Then you can wait some more. Shut it.”

“But they said we were gonna start working this morning ’cause they had a deadline–”

The look that Short And Slicked threw at Beard Face was so sharp that
I
felt it. He shut up and looked at the ragged bag at his feet. I glanced at it and saw the seven-pointed star stenciled on its surface. I looked behind the bus shelter; squeezed between the library and the strip joint was a police sub-station, closed for the day. All of it clicked together: the star was the symbol for Maersk Island, Santee Anchorage’s prison. The substation was closed because releases are filed in the morning. These three hadn’t been able to summon a tuk-tuk because their pais had restricted access. I couldn’t blink up their profiles on the Public because they hadn’t earned them back. They were parolees.

“I heard nothing,” I said.

“There was nothing to hear,” she said. “We’re just waiting for a ride.”

“You want me to call you one?” I said.

She waved me off. “We got it covered.”

I nodded. Eighteen months ago, finding them housing and jobs and counseling would have been my concern. It didn’t happen often during my time as Ward Chair, but it was always tough. Parolees were kept on short leashes until enough people began to vouch for their behavior, and that meant sticking them in the worst of the non-Slot jobs. People got sent to Maersk for crimes against other people: assault, rape, murder. I’ve been all over this planet, but I’ve never had reason to visit Maersk. Not even when Evanrute Saarien was sent there.

I clenched my jaw. I hadn’t given Saarien a moment’s thought until now. He’d been a Ward Chair from Sou’s Reach, home of the first cane refinery in the city. While some people would have seen that as an opportunity to be a good steward to a historic facility, Saarien turned it into the base for destroying the entire trans-stellar economy. He blew smoke up the Executive Committee’s ass, telling them he was using his Ward’s maintenance funds to build a community of artisans to boost the local economy. They were so taken with the weavers and glassblowers, they failed to notice him building an underground refinery to grow and process new strains of sugarcane that would have poisoned
all
the cane in Occupied Space. If he had succeeded, billions of people would have died from the ensuing upheaval. The son of a bitch had tried to burn me alive, and I sometimes wish I’d left him to die in the firestorm he’d intended for me. Instead, he was rotting away on Maersk, serving fifty years for fraud, embezzlement, conspiracy, kidnapping, attempted murder (including mine), and generally being an asshole. I entertained the notion of asking these three parolees if they had seen him, but the discussion probably wouldn’t end well. What would be the point in reminding them they’d been in prison?

A few moments later, a beat-up covered lorry pulled up to the bus stop, and the passenger-side window rolled down. “Get in,” said a girl’s voice. The parolees gathered their gear and hopped into the back. The girl leaned toward the side window to get a better look at them, then at me. Her eyes went wide, and so did mine. She was one of my employees, a Freeborn kid named Ly Huang. I didn’t mind my people moonlighting, so long as they did it when they weren’t supposed to be on my clock. “Oy!” I yelled, stepping toward the lorry.

Ly Huang’s face disappeared from the mirror, and the lorry rumbled away in a cloud of cane diesel exhaust. I blinked in pictures of the lorry’s tailgate, only to see that it didn’t have a license tag. The parolees all looked at me from the back, hunger in their eyes. What the hell had that kid gotten mixed up in? Is this what Marolo couldn’t tell me over the phone? Sweet and Merciful Buddha, this was not how being a member of the landed gentry was supposed to go.

I made a note to yell at Marolo about this withheld information and blinked up the time: three fifty-nine. I was going to have to spring for a tuk-tuk. I blinked a text to the We Laugh At Physics Travel Corporation, aka the company my protégé Jilly ran. She had put aside her dreams of becoming an airship pilot as the planetary economy slowed. Santee Anchorage still sent more industrial molasses up the cable than any system within a six-jump radius, but the demand for everything else we made had dwindled. It made more sense for a young woman Jilly’s age to keep schlepping people around on the surface than via the air.

She’d done really well for herself since her days as a cab driver, even joining the Union and earning a fist on her cheek. But she could never get a pai, not unless we convinced the right people with the right tech and the right skills to hop down to our dirtball. In the meantime, though, she carried a battered handheld that I could text at a moment’s notice. Now was one of those moments.
Need pickup to avoid horrible catastrophe
, I texted.

On it, Boss
, she texted back. The kid had gotten really good at typing.

Two minutes later, a candy apple red tuk-tuk screeched to a halt in front of the bus stop. A young woman with biceps like coconuts huddled behind the wheel. “The boss sends her regards,” she said as I hopped in behind her.

“What, she couldn’t get behind the wheel herself?”

The driver turned and laughed over her shoulder. “Not unless there’s a race for beer money.”

“Sometimes I wish that kid had stuck with flight school,” I said.

“I don’t,” said the big woman. “Jilly’s pay rates are great, and she lets us take our tuk-tuks home.”

“Is that an issue?”

“When you’ve got tuk-tuks getting boosted from every depot in the city, it sure is.”

“Well, that’s a damn shame,” I said. “There was a time when no one screwed with the Drivers’ Committee. Not unless they wanted to get their own teeth fed to them.”

“We’ll find the thieves, don’t you worry,” said the woman, and I felt sorry for whoever was going to be on the business end of her fists. She wore a tailored blouse that managed to make her look businesslike and even more physically impressive than if she’d worn a tank top. Her arms and shoulders bulged as she fiddled with the tuk-tuk’s console. She had either spent her life slinging bundles of cane or winning prize fights. Maybe both. “What’s your name?”

“Sirikit.”

I held out my hand. “Padma Mehta. You know where we’re going?”

Sirikit nodded as she crushed my hand. “The Old Windswept Distillery, right?”

“You got it.”

“I’ll have you there in twenty minutes.”

“But it’s a forty minute drive to Tanque.”

Sirikit flexed her neck as she turned toward the steering wheel. “Not the way
I
drive.” She punched the stereo to life, and Balinese opera blasted out from the speakers. I had just enough time to buckle in before we took off like enthusiastic bullets.

Nineteen minutes and forty-two seconds later (I had blinked up a timer, because watching it kept my mind off the terror of Sirikit cutting around cargo lorries and land trains at ridiculously unsafe speeds), the tuk-tuk came to a gentle halt in front of the two simple pourform huts that housed the Old Windswept Distillery. Estella Tonggow, the late founder, had been a brilliant chemist and designer. And, as I dug deeper into the books, I learned she had also found new and interesting ways to redefine “frugal.” While other distillers built fancy facilities with verandas and swooping lines, Tonggow had spent the bare minimum on two buildings that required no maintenance and could withstand force ten winds. The place was as ugly as a swamp hog’s backside, but it was what happened inside that counted.

Marolo stood outside the entrance, his face streaked with grease. He held up a caneplas box that rattled as he shook it. I could tell that he wanted to talk about the box and its contents, but it could wait. “Shouldn’t Ly Huang be here?”

He gave me a crooked smile. “Ah. I’m glad you decided to dispense with the small talk and get right to work.”

“I’d like
her
to get right to work. Why did I see her driving a lorry when she should be helping crush cane?”

“We’ll get to that.” He tipped the box toward me. “These bearings are shot.”

I peered at the two dozen metal balls inside the box, all bouncing off each other as he shook it. “We just replaced these! Hell,
I
just replaced them.”

“They’re defective,” he said. “They worked for about a hundred hours, and then they started pitting.”

I picked up a bearing and cursed. What should have been a perfect sphere looked like it had been nicked and scratched with forty-grit sandpaper. I sucked on my teeth to calm myself, because I knew there was no point in getting angry at Marolo.

“You need me to stick around?” asked Sirikit from the driver’s seat.

“Please.” I turned back to Marolo and held up the bearing. “These were rated for ten thousand hours, if I recall.”

“Fifteen thousand, actually,” said Marolo. “I made sure we saved the boxes. And the receipts. On paper.”

“Paper?” I shook my head. “Whatever happened to using a tablet?”

“You know anyone on this rock making replacement tablet parts?” He shook the box. “These were relatively cheap. Getting circuitry to fix a busted tablet would cost more than you pay me in a year.”

“I pay you a lot.”

“That you do,” said Marolo. “But unless you know of someone growing computer hardware on Santee, I’ll stick to paper. I can always get more of it.”

I dropped the ruined ball bearing back into the box. “When can we get more of these?”

“We have them. I told you they were cheap.”

I sighed. “Then why in hell did you haul me all the way out here? Is it so I can fire Ly Huang? You know you have the power to do that without my say-so.”

“Ly Huang’s absence is one of the many things I wanted to talk with you about, starting with the way this place runs,” said Marolo. He put the box on the ground. “Those bearings are just the icing on the ridiculous cake.”

“I told you this was going to be a weird gig.”

“Yeah, but not that it was going to be like this!” said Marolo, pointing back at the distillery. “You have machinery that dates back to the Information Age! You’re using parts that break down when there are upgrades that will last until the heat death of the universe! You’ve got people beating cane with cricket bats!”

I shrugged. “It’s the way Madame Tonggow did it.”

He threw his hands into the air. “And there it is. The one thing that everyone says when I question why they’re doing the stupid thing that they’re doing. ‘Estella Tonggow always did it this way, so that’s why we keep doing it.’ Why, Padma? For God’s sake, why do you keep invoking that woman like she’s the Creator?”

“Because she
is
,” I said. “She made this distillery and this rum, and whatever she did we are going to keep on doing because it
works
.”

“But even she must have improvised or changed or–”

I held up a hand to Marolo’s chest. “I don’t care. If we want to keep making Old Windswept Rum, that means we make it her way. We don’t have the room to experiment, especially since neither of us are chemists like she was.”