Severance (27 page)

Eventually, the men on the desk stepped down, satisfied with
whatever they had done. The crowd began to simmer, bubbles of anxious whispering
percolating to the surface. Another five minutes passed before Mayor Kinsella stepped
out of the apartment door, where he was hoisted gracelessly onto the stage by
one of his large men. A handful of people began clapping, but this failed to catch
on, the applause lamely petering out a few seconds later.

§

A growl deep in Kinsella’s throat, which he struggled to
tamp down. Normally, Bletmann would have salted the crowd with more clappers,
but he evidently hadn’t had the time for this occasion. No applause would have
been better than that feeble exhibition; it would have lent the event a somber,
sober effect. Now, he just looked unpopular, some asshole with a microphone.

“Good evening, citizens,” the asshole said into the
microphone. “I am here to speak to you about the events of the past week — the
events that have caused so much confusion and mayhem. I apologize, deeply and
sincerely, for the lack of communication from myself and your government. I can
only state that this disruption has affected me just as much as it has you. Perhaps
more.” He frowned, looking down at the text Bletmann had insisted on preparing
for him.
That idiot.
Eyes back up at the crowd. “No, not more. You have
suffered more than me.”

“Although a victim myself, I have not been idle. Your
government has been working tirelessly to uncover the truth about what has happened
over the past few days.” Kinsella took a deep breath and put his ‘very serious
and extremely concerned’ face on. “But I’m sorry to say that the truth is far
different from the story we’ve been told by our captain.

“First, the parts that you already know. Captain Helot has
seized control of the aft of the Argos. In doing so, he has deposed the Argos’
rightfully elected government from power and forced several hundred innocent
civilians from their homes. He has slandered and falsely accused me and other
innocent people. These acts alone rank amongst the most outrageous crimes ever
perpetrated in our history. But they pale when compared to what Helot tried to
do first.”

A chorus of chirrups interrupted Kinsella, erupting from every
terminal in the audience. A small cough, then the diffuse sound of Helot’s
voice speaking via the ship’s public address. “The only thing I’ve tried to do
is protect the ship from your plot, mayor. Everything you’ve said is a lie.
Everything you’ll ever say is a lie.”

Kinsella swallowed and remained calm. He looked down at Bletmann
on the floor below him. Kinsella said nothing, letting his eyes talk for him. “
Blind
rage,”
the eyes politely informed Bletmann.

Bletmann swallowed. “
Keep talking,”
he mouthed,
pointing at the audio system they had set up. Kinsella got it: the system was a
hack job, completely independent from the ship’s main PA system. Helot could
interrupt, but not silence him.

“Everything I’ve said is the truth!” Kinsella shouted back. “Asshole!”
he added. A few hurrahs from the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I hope I’m not spoiling your
innocence when I point out that the mayor does occasionally lie to us,” Helot
said. “We all know this. We expect it from him. That’s why we voted for him.
Because he was the
best
liar.”

“I am not a liar!”

“Hands up if you suspect the mayor might lie sometimes,”
Helot asked the ship.

Hundreds of outstretched hands appeared almost instantly, their
numbers swelling as the crowd exchanged reminders with each other of his past
over–promises.

“The reason the mayor is lying right now is to cover up what
he’s done,” Helot continued. “He was planning to destroy the engines of this
ship so that we couldn’t stop at Tau Prius.”

Gasps filled the crowd, most still standing with their hands
up.

“That’s the biggest lie of all!” Kinsella shouted. “You were
trying to split the ship in two!”

Helot laughed, a fake, forced, utterly unbelievable stretch
of a laugh. But the audience laughed alongside him. “Kinsella,” Helot began, his
exasperation clearly feigned, at least to Kinsella’s ear. “Do you have any
proof of this at all? Of these wild accusations you’re throwing around?”

“You told me all of this yourself!”

“Do you even know what evidence means?” The audience laughed
again. A woman in the front row fainted.
Not now, you idiot.
Kinsella
glared at Bletmann, who waved frantically at someone in the crowd, which only
seemed to prompt more women to faint.

“Allow me to show you what evidence means,” Helot continued.
“You’ll recall our conversation right before you tried to blackmail me into silence?”

“What?”

“Security Chief Thorias is shortly going to be transmitting
proof to the ship that you ordered the creation of falsified images of child pornography,
which you intended to plant in my personal effects. To blackmail me to stand
aside as you attempted your plot.”

“That’s not why I was trying to blackmail you!” Kinsella
shouted. He groaned at the exact same time that everyone else in the crowd groaned.
“That was a joke,” he shouted. “I was joking.” At the edges of the crowd,
people began filtering away. “Come on! I’m not the bad guy here.”

Helot went in for the kill. “Kinsella’s been on the run ever
since his plot failed. That’s why you haven’t seen him; he’s been hiding from
our security teams. And now he’s trying to orchestrate a coup. Or more of a
reverse coup.” Clearly seeing the same looks of confusion on the crowd’s faces
that Kinsella was looking at, Helot hesitated. “A coup is when the army…never mind.
A coup is a bad thing. Kinsella is doing a bad thing.”

The crowd had no problem accepting that. A discontented
murmur started to build, punctuated by a few angry shouts and at least two more
faints. “Stop doing coups!” someone close to the stage yelled, pointing at
Kinsella. “Stop couping us, Mayor!”

“Are you fucking serious?” Kinsella shouted, quivering. “You
fucking imbeciles.”

“I would ask the citizens of the Argos to please restrain
the mayor until security can arrive to take him into custody,” Helot said, the
punch line echoing off the buildings lining the plaza.

Kinsella knew when cowardly running was the better part of
valor, and had already leapt off the stage by the time Helot had finished his
request, retreating into the building from which he had emerged, his bodyguards
forming a vanguard behind him. They at least had understood who was really couping
who, or perhaps more likely, hadn’t followed the conversation at all.

§

A click interrupted the daydream Stein had been having about
punching her boss in the face. In an alcove on the side of the room, a meal bar
rattled down a chute, bounced once in the dispensing alcove, then fell to the
floor below, marking the arrival of lunch time.

Getting up from her bunk, Stein crossed the room and picked
up the meal bar, her bruised body complaining with every movement. It turned
out that Hogg was amongst the gentlest of the security goons; every other one
Stein had met since her capture had taken a vigorous interest in foiling the
many attempts at resisting arrest they imagined she was making. Although not an
expert on the matter, she suspected she was earning a little more attention
than most criminals in custody.
So, they actually think I set off a bomb.

The cell was nicer than the one in the bow, not much
different from the basic ultra–low–end studio apartment she’d had in school but
for the door that never opened. A solid platform mounted to one of the walls
held a pair of mattress approximations, one above the other. In the opposite
corner sat a toilet, beside that a sink. Further down the wall was the alcove
where food regularly crashed into view. An armored security sensor in the upper
corner of the room watched over everything dispassionately. Opposite the bunk
was a desk, outwardly identical to every other desk on board the ship.
Inwardly, it had a sharply limited interface and was unable to send messages or
access many parts of the network, only allowing the cell’s occupant to read filtered
selections from the public news feeds and library. Stein had done little but
read this for the past two days, at least when not fantasizing about making her
boss wet his pants in front of his new peers. She slumped down in the chair,
and began picking at her meal bar, paging through the news feeds.

Kinsella’s impromptu debate with the captain was all anyone
was talking about. Even knowing that he was telling the truth, she still
thought he had come off poorly. That said, it appeared there were still a few people
taking his side; being labeled a criminal had actually improved his reputation
somewhat. Argosians loved an underdog.

She turned off the desk and painfully flopped into bed,
rolling onto her back, her eyes sliding up the wall towards the ceiling and the
membrane housed just over the door. The membrane regulated the carbon dioxide
differential between the room and the corridor and could seal shut in the event
of a vacuum on either side. The only opening in what would otherwise be an
airtight room, this particular membrane, unlike most, was secured behind thick
metal bars. She had already identified it as the only potential route of
escape. But two days of staring at it — and she couldn’t have been the first of
the room’s residents to do that — had yet to reveal a way through those bars.

Another click and a rattle from the food chute. Stein sat up
in bed, brow furrowed. It was far too early for another meal. She watched as a
small maintenance robot crashed out of the chute, landing with a thump on the
floor. Righting itself, it scurried around the floor, banging into the cell
door. “Beep,” the robot said, then crashed into the door again.

Stein darted out of bed and scooped the robot up, finding
the unit’s power switch and deactivating it. Flipping it over again, Stein
could see that it had a terminal strapped to its back, the phrase “Shit Cake”
written on it in large letters. An inside joke she wasn’t in on, but at least
it was clear where it had come from. “You big, beautiful bastard,” she whispered
to the comatose robot. She hurried back to her bunk, shoulders spread wide to
hide the robot, then dove into the lower bunk, where she would mostly be out of
sight of the security sensor.

Now, what to do with this?
With the terminal she
could start communicating with the outside world again. A message to Bruce
thanking him for his care package might be in order. On the other hand, she had
no idea how closely she was being watched. Terminals could be tracked —
security would probably notice the second she turned it on. And a message to
Bruce — or Abdolo Poland or whatever the fuck he was calling himself now —
might similarly get him in trouble. He was still a fugitive, too.

The fact that the robot came with the terminal rather than
just dropping it off was important. Bruce wanted her to use it. He wanted her
to rescue herself.
The lazy fuck.
She turned the robot over in her
hands, inspecting its manipulators and built–in tools, and started mentally
applying them to various surfaces in her cell.

§

Hogg stomped down the center of the street, ignoring the wave
of insults and curses that followed in his wake. His particular uniform hadn’t been
very popular since Kinsella’s big speech. Although most people seemed to think
their mayor was rehearsing some kind of hilarious new comedy routine at the
time, at least a few people had believed his story. And now that openly hating
security was a thing to do, it was a thing they did.

Hogg couldn’t say for sure that he believed everything the
oily man had said, but damned if it didn’t make just a bit of oily sense. The similarities
between the mayor’s story and Stein’s were too close not to notice. Though that
would make sense, if they were working together.
But…
there wasn’t much
actual evidence they were working together. Just a press release from Thorias
about a fake interrogation that hadn’t occurred. Why would Thorias lie about
that? The permutations spun around in Hogg’s head. It was all very complicated.

And then he had received a message instructing him to go
arrest Kinsella and felt instant relief. This, at least, was simple. Something
he could do. Something he had to do.

Even if he kind of didn’t want to.

The mayor had probably traveled in disguise to the square on
the first level where most of the sensors were broken. But he had left the
event in a bit of a hurry, too much of a hurry to change disguise, and also
hadn’t shed the four large, highly visible men traveling with him. The sensors
had tracked the group until they entered the abandoned arena on the first
level, the arena Hogg was standing in front of now.

At one time, this had been the ship’s skating rink, although
it had long since been repurposed to provide a big empty room where people
could slide around on wheeled desk chairs and crash into each other. Whether
the mayor and his pals were doing that or not, Hogg wouldn’t guess. The odds
were low, certainly. But not zero.

As a base of operations, though, it was a legitimately smart
choice. Multiple entrances and exits, located on wide streets that were hard to
sneak up on. It would take a lot of officers to lock down completely. And Hogg only
had himself.

He approached the two highly visible men at the front door. They
weren’t taking any particular pride in their work, seemingly distracted by a
group of prostitutes down the street, and didn’t notice Hogg until he was
within a few meters of them, at which point they did notice him, hard. “Relax,”
Hogg said, coming to a stop a nice, non–threatening distance away. He held his
hands up in a calming gesture. “I’m not here to arrest anyone.”