Windswept (19 page)

“Damn hard work,” said One-Eye.

“Damn hard,” said Banks. “And
now
you’re telling me that we hafta work again? Doing shit work?”

“It’s not all shit work,” I said. “I mean, yeah, a lot of it is, but not all of it.”

“But why?”

“Be
cause
,” said Madolyn, lifting her head off the bartop and jabbing Banks on the forehead, “because there are only so many jobs to go around, and WalWa or LiaoCon or MacDonald don’t want to give away any
more
jobs than they have to, so that’s how it goes.” She plunked her head back down and started snoring.

“What she said,” I replied, focusing on the round of shots that had just appeared. I blinked a picture of the label – Next Century Amber, which always tasted like rotting bananas – then held the glass aloft. “Here’s to Banks, may he not have to work too long so we won’t have to hear his whining about it.”

“Hear, hear!” said One-Eye, slamming down the rum and wincing. “This is horrible.”

“I know,” I said, hiding the glass below the bartop. I poured the rum on the ground, then lifted the empty glass to my mouth and tipped it up fast. I had done stealth dumps for the past six hours. We’d gone to thirty different bars, tried a hundred fifty different rums, always insisting on new bottles. We hadn’t encountered any more skunked rum, which really pissed me off: if it had gone bad, at least I wouldn’t have had to pay for it. Right now, I was almost two thousand yuan down, an amount that I realized Tonggow hadn’t promised to reimburse.

“But it’s also great!” said One-Eye, her cheeks flushed bright red.

I passed her a plate full of takoyaki. “Eat up,” I said. “These are great for soaking up booze.”

“Righteous,” she said, scarfing two of the battered balls at once. She chewed for a few moments, then said, her mouth full, “It’s not always going to be like this, is it? The food, the drinks, the... the not working?”

“There’s always going to be work,” I said. “It’s just a matter of there being enough jobs. We got the Contract coming up for renewal in less than two years, and everyone’s fighting for a piece of the pie.” I waved for one last round. “Problem is, the pie’s been getting smaller for decades, and no one wants to admit it.”

“How many jobs are we talking about?” said One-Eye. “Like... enough for us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m high enough on the totem pole to know there’s a problem, but not high enough to know the exact number. Every time I’ve asked the people above me, they tell me not to worry, which is a sure sign that something bad is gonna happen.” I twirled an empty shot glass in my fingers, watching the light glint off the hard edges. “But if you’re worried about getting into hot water with WalWa, don’t. There’s no way they can get you, not here. Not now.”

“What about all that talk back on the beach?”

The bartender put a new bottle of Olmos Green in front of us. The Green was a favorite of mine that had fresh cane shoots mixed into the mash. It looked like liquid emeralds. I smiled at One-Eye as I opened the bottle. “Hell, you know the old saying. All that stuff I said was recruitment. This is real.”

The rum smelled perfect, like freshly cut grass on a spring day. The bartender held up five fingers; fifty yuan a bottle. Jesus. I poured shots for me and One-Eye, and, this time, I downed the whole thing.

Banks groaned and lifted his head off the bar; a string of drool hung from his mouth. “This place is dead,” he said. “Can we go somewhere fun?”

We piled out of the bar and into Tonggow’s waiting limo. The driver and I exchanged pointed glances; he was a Freeborn man who’d barely said a word during our tour. I was embarrassed; I couldn’t tell if he was angry or bemused. “Where to next?” he said.

I blinked up the time: four-ten. We were a good twenty minutes from Brushhead, which meant one more round at Big Lily’s, and then I was throwing in the towel. Tonggow’s polite request could wait until after six o’clock. “Mercer and Moore,” I said. “Don’t take the scenic route.”

“I hear the sewage plant’s lovely this time of day,” said the driver. I shook my head and hopped in. The limo glided into traffic like an armored swan. I texted Big Lily to prepare for our arrival.

“You know,” said One-Eye, turning toward me, “I was pretty sure you’d have a pitch to make.”

“What, this isn’t enough?” I said. She didn’t laugh. Neither did Mimi or the old ladies. They all stared at me, like hungry dogs waiting for someone to toss them a steak. Except Banks. Banks looked out the window.

“The pitch,” I sighed, then took a sip of water from the bottles the driver had set out for us. “Why did you jump ship?”

“What kind of pitch is that?” said One-Eye.

“Why did you all get into an empty fuel can that dropped a hundred and fifteen thousand kilometers onto a planet you’d only heard about through whispers and graffiti, rather than stay upstairs in your nice, solid lives? Why?”

One-Eye crossed her arms and leaned back. “Really? That’s all you’ve got? We want to know what’s in it for–”

“The smell,” said one of the old ladies. Gricelda. The one allergic to eggplant.

“What about the smell?” I said.

She cleared her throat. “Every morning, I would wake up in my bunk, and the air smelled like dead roses and rust. It was all the recycling. It may have scrubbed out the CO
₂
, but it did nothing about the smells from all the fishsticks. All the belching, the farting, the way their bodies got a little pickled in the hibernant. Every night, I would clean myself up, wash my nose and throat, hoping to get the smell out. And then there it would be the next morning, reminding me that this was my life, and would continue to be my life for the rest of the trip.”

“How long?”

“We tended that ship for six jumps,” said Madolyn. “Two years to get past the Red Line, two years to return. A few weeks in port...”

“
Eight
jumps,” said Gricelda, taking Madolyn’s hand. “You forgot the first two. We’ve been underway for over thirty years.”

“When was the last time you were on solid land?” I said

Madolyn shook her head, and a tear trickled down Gricelda’s cheek. “Every time we got close to fulfilling our Contract, a WalWa rep would talk us into an extension for greater benefits,” said Madolyn. “Do another jump, get more stock options. Put in another jump, your medical’s bumped up to the next tier. Sign on for an extended tour, and we’d be set for life.” She set her jaw as her eyes got wet. “Then I looked in the mirror and realized I wouldn’t have much of a life left. No matter how good the artificial gravity is, you know you’re in a cage and dying by degrees.”

I nodded, then turned to Mimi. “How about you?”

“It was all Thanh,” she said, the drunken wavering gone from her voice. “We only had one more run to do to meet our obligation. Another four years, and our Indentures would have been fulfilled. We managed those plants for five seeding trips, raised all of them our own, and now it’s gone. For what?” She snuffed with bitter laughter, wiped an arm on her sleeve, already stained from a long day’s drinking. “Fool couldn’t wait another four years, and now he’s dead and I’m stuck here without our plants.” She swallowed, fighting down the lumps in her throat.

Comfort and understanding I could fake, but what this woman wanted, I couldn’t deliver.

“Mimi?” We both looked up at Banks, who had reached out with an open hand. Mimi hesitated, then took it.

“I was only with you guys for that one run, but we both know Thanh wanted you two off that ship,” he said. “Remember how we all used to work the water hyacinth tank together? Four hours a day, in muck up to our waists?”

Mimi shivered, then laughed at herself.

“And WalWa wouldn’t replace the waders they’d issued you on your first trip,” said Banks. “Remember that?”

“Awful things, even then,” she said, gripping Banks’s fingers. “Always rode up funny, didn’t keep the water out. Wore out two months in.”

“And that wasn’t all that crapped out on that ship, was it?” His voice was smooth and mellow.

She shook her head. “That ship was a nightmare. Leaking steam fittings, parasites in the water lines, and the way the fishsticks would come awake sometimes...” She shuddered and let go of Banks’s hand, going for her water bottle.

Banks nodded. “You weren’t getting quite the deal WalWa said you were, and Thanh knew it. He was waiting for a run to a place like Santee so he could get you two out of there.”

Mimi swayed a bit and took a long pull at the bottle. “But how could he leave me?” she said, her voice getting thick again. “How could he go away like that?”

“I’m sure he didn’t want to,” said Banks. “In fact, I think he’d be sad to see you like this right now. This was his dream for the both of you: to be free of WalWa and to run your own lives for once.”

Mimi looked up at Banks with watery, reddened eyes. “I just want him back.”

“I know,” said Banks, moving to the seat next to Mimi her and wrapping an arm around her. She cried a while, and Banks rocked her back and forth. I took the now-empty bottle from her hand, and she gripped my arm with fierce, bony fingers. Finally, her crying eased off, and she let go of us both. “I need a moment,” she said, and she scooted to an empty part of the cavernous limo.

I crunched the caneplas bottle. “Thanh must have been quite a man,” I said, dropping the trash into the compost bucket.

“He was a bullying asshole,” said One-Eye.

“Ellie!” cried the old ladies.

“He
was
,” said One-Eye. “It didn’t matter that
I
was the one who had authority over running the ship. Whenever there was an issue with his goddamned plants, he’d piss and moan about how he was the only one keeping us alive, and if we didn’t help him we were all dead. Every fucking day he’d push us around the greenhouse until our fingers bled. Literally.” She held up her hands, a constellation of scars on her knuckles and fingertips. “He didn’t want to Breach to be free. He’d just heard the porn on Santee was better than the stuff WalWa let him carry on the ship.” She pounded the side of the car, then sat back, crossing her arms and staring into the distance.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I started that rumor myself.”

One-Eye snorted, crossed her massive arms over her chest. “Then you did your marketing professors proud, ’cause you sure as hell knew your audience.” She shook her head. “The only two good things that son of a bitch ever did were getting Mimi into that can and dropping dead on the way down.”

“Spoken like a true resident of Santee,” I said, giving the compost bucket a shake. “They probably would’ve gotten divorced within the year. The cracks show pretty quickly in bad Breach marriages.”

“How high is the divorce rate?” asked Banks.

“Astronomical,” I said. “Of course, if you want to divorce someone, you just say so in front of a paied witness or a Public terminal, and that’s that.”

“Damn,” said Banks.

“So, what about you?” said One-Eye.

I blinked up the time: four-twenty. “Oh, you know... got screwed over one time too many and decided I wanted more. How about you... Ellie?” I said. “Why’d you jump?”

“I know what you’re doing,” she said, still staring out the window.

“And what’s that?”

She looked at me, her scarred face shriveled and red. “I know your type,” she said, leaning forward like a cane viper coiling up for a strike. “You learn how to psyche people out, how to manipulate them, how to get them to do what you want. And you start by getting into our heads, finding our weak points.”

“If it’s any comfort, I don’t think you
have
any weak points.”

“See? See?” She pointed her finger, and her face got harder. “There you are, doing it. Trying to get me on your side.”

“I don’t care what side you’re on, just as long as it’s not the Big Three’s.” I felt like she was going to take a swing at me, the way her entire body tensed and focused all that energy in one finger. The back of my brain itched, the feeling that I had seen this woman before.

And, of course, I had: there had been plenty of people who got in my face and wanted to start fights with them. Good thing I was nice and drunk and not in the mood to take any shit from her, especially since I was on Tonggow’s business. I wasn’t about to let her screw things up for me. “You still want to go Sou’s Reach? I’ll call you a tuk-tuk, have you delivered in twenty minutes. Just let me get you signed up with the Union so you’re protected.”

“Like you protected us last night?” said One-Eye. “I can’t
wait
to see how you’ll do against an actual mob.”

“Last night was a mistake,” I said, “and I’m sorry it happened. I should have been more careful. It won’t happen again.”

“Damn right,” said One-Eye, waving off a bottle of water from Mimi. She cracked open a decanter and poured a finger into one of Tonggow’s cut crystal glasses, downing the rum in one gulp. “You know when I last had a drink? The night I got fired from my first job at WalWa.”

Aha. An opening. “How?”

“Well, you can’t drink when you’re shipbound, so–”

“No, I mean, how’d you get fired?” I pointed to her Indenture tattoo. “Even if you kill someone, HR wouldn’t give you the boot – they’d just counsel you to death.”

One-Eye made a face as she poured another finger. “I had this boss,” she said. “Always talked about how it was important to do the work, to look out for the people you’re supposed to mentor.” She spat on the ground. “Backstabbing psycho, she set me up to fail every damn time. Never gave me what I needed, talked shit about me while she smiled to my face. She got me fired, said I wasn’t Big Three material.”

“What was the job?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said One-Eye, her face softening just the tiniest bit, and I wondered again what had happened to make this woman so hard. “It didn’t work out, and I became an engineer. I got to fix things. That was enough. For a while.”

One-Eye didn’t strike me as the type who needed a comforting arm around her shoulder, so I just passed her a bottle of aspirin. “Preventative,” I said. “The hangover’s going to be brutal.”

I thought about having the driver take us around the back, but I figured the hell with it. Everyone wanted to think I was some rising star? Fine. I’d show them what that looked like. We stopped in front of Big Lily’s and piled out, the driver’s face not even twitching as Banks retched on the sidewalk.