Windswept (3 page)

“Saarien isn’t the only former Corporate recruiter here,” I said. “What about Chenisse Lau? I used to hang out with her a lot.”

“You used to get in fights with her a lot,” said Big Lily. “Remember that year I banned you both from here?”

“She started it,” I said, looking into my tea. “Saying I didn’t pay attention to my Ward. What the hell did she know?”

“My point, Padma,” said Big Lily, “is that, while I can appreciate your desire to get your payout, there’s still plenty here to focus on. Chenisse was right: your Ward has to come first.”

“If you’re trying to tell me to go along with Bloombeck for the good of the Ward–”

“Oh, hell, no!” Big Lily laughed. “But what you did for Odd? That’s what you should be doing more of. Especially since it gets you stuff like this.” She put a plate of kumara cakes before me.

I smelled the sweet steamy cakes. “Oh, you are a doll.” I broke open a cake and took a bite, the hot filling burning my tongue.

Big Lily shook her head, then took out a fluted tasting glass off the rack behind her. She set it down in front of me, next to the bottle of Beaulieu’s.

“I told you, it’s not after six,” I said, reaching for another cake.

“It’s not for you,” she said, nodding to the other end of the room. I followed her chin and saw a guy sitting by the window. He wasn’t really my type, but he had a chest like a rum barrel and eyes that didn’t look too hard. “He’s been watching you all afternoon.”

“You have the best way of looking out for your customers.”

“It’s my job to know what my customers need,” said Big Lily, throwing me a wink and walking to the other end of the bar.

I grabbed my tea and the bottle and the glass and walked over to the window. The man with the not-hard eyes looked up at me.

“I like your taste,” he said, flicking his eyes at the rum.

“It’s not my favorite,” I said, sitting down across from him. He had a circle of stars around his Union ink, the sign of someone who’d put in time on the anchor. “But I still like to share it.”

He nodded as I poured him a shot of Beaulieu’s. “Sharing’s good.”

“So am I.” We clinked glasses.

The only good thing about my former employer damaging my brain was that I didn’t need an alarm clock.

My eyes popped open just before the muezzin cleared her throat and started the evening Maghrib. The Emerald Masjid stood two blocks away from my building, and its speakers were just in line with my second-story flat. It was like she was in my ear, calling me to prayer along with the rest of the faithful. I blinked up a clock: five forty-two. Almost time.

I slipped out of my bed and into my bra and pants. As I pulled on a shirt, Anchor Boy stirred, one muscled arm flopping over where my waist would have been. He had been good – really good – and I really didn’t want to wake him and send him packing. Still, six o’clock was six o’clock, and I wasn’t in the mood to explain what was about to happen. I grabbed his shoulder and shook him.

“Uh?” he said, his eyes flickering open. “Hi, uh…” He blinked, trying not to be too obvious about pulling up my profile and name. “Padma?”

“Very polite,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

He nodded as he levered himself up. “Hey, you’re right. Happy Hour is about to start over at–”

“No,” I said. “Not time for
us
to go. Just you.”

He sank to his elbows. “I do something wrong?”

“Nope,” I said. “You were great. But I need to be alone now.”

Anchor Boy gave me a smile, which evaporated when I didn’t return it. He shrugged and got up.

For a brief moment, when he pulled on his shorts and reached for his coveralls, I thought about saying,
No, please, stay
. I never had company at six o’clock, and he’d been so attentive in the sack, maybe it would be the same when we had our clothes on...

No. I had to do this alone, or it wouldn’t work. That’s what Dr Ropata had said, and he’d been right about everything else everything so far. I leaned against the door frame, my hands behind my back, watching Anchor Boy get dressed.

“Be careful up there,” I said. “Wouldn’t want you to lose focus and press the big stop button.”

“It’s actually a series of switches,” he said, grabbing his deck jacket and walking to the door. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking if I can call you?”

“You can try,” I said, tapping my temple. “My pai’s a little messed up, though.”

He nodded. “Look me up if you ever get it fixed,” he said, then clicked the door behind him.

I counted to five before leaping up and locking the door. I pulled every window shade closed but for the one in my tiny sitting room, the one that looked out over all of Santee City clear to the ocean and the massive lifter complex offshore. It was a view that would have cost a fortune but for the fact that Marjorie Ling, the landlady, was one of the first Breaches I fished out of the water after I became a recruiter. She still threatened to raise my rent to match the market every year, but a bottle of Still Standing Silver and the reminder that she owed my ass kept the price under control. Marjorie gouged the bejeezus out of her other tenants to make up for it.

The row houses of Brushhead rolled away on the gentle hills until they ran into the cane plants in Budvar and Faoshue. In the mornings, when the breeze came off the ocean, the smell of molasses and cooking sugar would drift up from the exhaust vents, overpowering every other scent my neighbors made. On some days, like the middle of summer when the refinery at Sou’s Reach had busted and no one had taken a shower in weeks, the smell from the cane plants was the best thing in the world. It was also a better alarm clock than the chimes my pai made despite my turning off that option years ago.

I watched the sun begin its dip toward the horizon, and the water in the Ivory Canal sparkled like a billion fifty-jiao coins. In the middle of the canal were the rusting boxes of Partridge Hutong, my first home when I came to Santee, and I had to admit even they looked good in this light. There was no way in hell I’d ever go back there, of course, same as I’d never go back to night shifts at the water-treatment plant that had given Brushhead its name. I couldn’t see the plant from my window, and that was a bonus. The pile of rusting pipes and misshapen holding tanks made Partridge look like a palace. The plant may have kept everyone employed, but that didn’t mean I had to love it, not like I loved the rest of the Ward.

The gentle golden glow sparkled off the rooftops as the neon signs of the bars, strip clubs and churches winked on. Somewhere out there, shifts were changing, people were going to or from work, opening bottles of rum or throwing away the dead soldiers. I took in one more breath, watched the light glint off the lifter ribbon, then closed the last shade, turning the room completely dark. The blackout shades had cost a month’s wages, but they worked better than my old method of tacking heavy blankets over the windows. Looked nicer, too.

I sat at the kitchen table and reached under, found the candle and bottle I kept there and set them both in front of me. The candle was from an old hurricane kit, one that had been used and refilled a dozen times so far. It wasn’t important. The bottle was.

It had a triangular base and was made from bumpy green-blue glass. The bottle’s label was a cartoon of a woman’s foot propped up on a lanai railing, overlooking the coast at Saticoy, a few klicks north of here. It was quite a pretty foot, manicured and smooth, and there was a string tied to the big toe. At the other end of the string was a box kite, high up in the cartoon sky, pushed about by some men in clouds, blowing on the thing. I had been using this bottle of Old Windswept for the past year, and it would last me another six months, if I was careful. And I was
always
careful.

The bottle was cool and comforting in my hand, like a heat sink drawing away all the tension from the work day. Hour after hour of dealing with angry people unhappy with their shifts, their supervisors, their Contract slots, and, just for extra texture, having to fend off Vytai Bloombeck–

I winced at the stabbing pain in my right eye and groaned. God, just thinking about him made my pai twitch. Terrific.

The pain receded, and I blinked back the video buffer to earlier this afternoon. I watched Bloombeck’s offer again, just to remind myself that turning him down had been the right thing to do.
“Forty Breaches!”
he said, and I blinked it off. Enough.

I caught a lick of afternoon breeze and smiled. The same wind had caught me the first time I’d stepped out of the WalWa office in Thronehill, and I hadn’t looked back. I could do the same with Bloombeck’s deal. I could do the same with The Fear, scraping around up in there, especially now that it was six o’clock.

I lit the candle, and it sent out a warm yellow glow, like my flat was inside a stick of butter. I watched the flame dance to my breath, then closed my eyes and did what Dr Ropata prescribed all those years ago: I imagined me, sitting at my table, the candle and bottle in front of me. Then I let the camera in my mind pull back until I was outside my building, looking down over Brushhead. Then, farther back, until I could see the entire city below me, a smudge of buildings and streets in the middle of hectares and hectares of swaying green industrial sugarcane stalks. Then, even farther back, until I was above Santee Anchorage, where I could see the thin black line of the lifter reaching up to the orbital anchor, now surrounded by ships coming and going.

Then out into open space, watching my solar system’s four other planets and yellow sun shrink to tiny points as my mind travelled beyond the Red Line, where it was safe enough to jump between systems. And farther still, until I could see all of Occupied Space, the stars and planets where people had made their way, where the Big Three tried to buy and sell everything and everyone, where other Union people fought and worked and lived and died, and then all the way out and out and out to the vast, limitless reaches of the Universe in all its wonder, its glory, its beauty.

I opened my eyes, then unscrewed the bottle. The cinnamon and pear scents from the Old Windswept washed over me, and I lifted the bottle to my lips, remembering Dr Ropata: just enough to taste, not enough to call a drink. It was a fine line, but I’d had enough practice. The rum sloshed as I tilted it back–

The minaret speaker crackled to life with a spike of feedback so loud I jumped out of my chair. I also banged my teeth against the bottle as Louise Ellison, the muezzin, sang out in Old Arabic,
Woe unto those eternal travelers; may they reach their destination with God!
Even with everyone pai’d up and Public terminals on every corner, sometimes the fastest way to spread important news was from the rooftops. I’d have to check in, see what the deal was, what ship went down, but that could wait. I lifted the bottle again...

And now the carillon at Our Lady of the Big Shoulders began to chime. What the hell? Vespers wasn’t for another hour, and, even then, this was a Wednesday. Louie Kwan, the organist, had the day off, and he only sat down to play if something big was going on. Something like–

Then I recognized the music: “Eternal Father, Strong To Save.” Louie usually let the Emerald Masjid take care of the salvation business unless it was more than one ship. As he rolled around to the end of the first verse, and I knew there’d be people in the city taking off their hats and singing along: “Oh grant Thy mercy and Thy grace, to those who venture into space.”

And then a shofar sounded off. Then a conch shell. Then a whole chorus of horns, bells, voices, all of them calling out to the sky, which meant that it had been one hell of a mess up in orbit. Still, there was nothing I could do on the ground, so I lifted the bottle–

And then silence, except for one lone trumpet, sounding over the rooftops. For a brief moment, I hoped it was someone just adding a grace note to the proceedings, but then I recognized the tune – one that Big Lily and the rest of the old miners would play whenever one of their number died. I went to the window, pulled open the blinds, and looked a few blocks west to where Big Lily’s bar was.

She stood on the roof, her skirts snapping in the evening breeze. She had a trumpet to her lips, and she was blowing a song from Dead Earth: “Gresford,” the Miners’ Hymn. We may have all been one big Union, but every trade mourned their own in their own way. The ships that had gone down must have been miners. I’d have to go back to Big Lily’s to pay my respects, but only after I’d taken this sip, and...

Mining ships. Oh, shit.

I blinked up a link to the Public and loaded the traffic queue. I scrolled until I saw them, the fifteen LiaoCon ore processors, now at the top of the lifter, waiting to off-load, and–

One by one, the names blinked, then turned blood red. Within a minute, all fifteen ships were listed as lost in transit with all hands. Four hundred sixty-two souls. Oh, those poor fucking people.

…and those twenty-seven you’d counted on…
hissed The Fear before it laughed and laughed and laughed.

I looked at the bottle of Old Windswept, then blew out the candle and got up. It wouldn’t do me a bit of good now, not with the sinking feeling in my gut over all those deaths combined with my rising anger at how they probably died. LiaoCon padded their bottom line by skimping on maintenance, by using cheap materials, by running ships twenty years past their hulls’ expiration dates. Four hundred and sixty-two people, all worked to death, just to make some fucking LiaoCon Shareholders a few extra yuan. Hell, even the ships’ potential destruction was probably part of some actuarial equation, a loss against future profits. My heart pounded as I got up.

I pulled on my cargo trousers and boots, well-worn and almost ready for a resole, then my deck jacket, the one I’d borrowed from Wash eleven years ago and had forgotten to return. Through the window, I could hear the traffic sounds and background noise of the neighborhood had picked back up: the sizzle of tritip roasting on outdoor grills, the two-tone beep of tuk-tuk horns, the sounds of bar bands tuning up. Union people would always pause for a remembrance, but they sure as hell wouldn’t stop. The city was in the middle of a shift change, and that meant everyone was moving. It would be the perfect time to get in touch with someone inside Thronehill, one of those now-thawed fishsticks who’d realized how screwed they were and wanted to poke back at their corporate masters. Problem was, it would take days to get in touch with someone friendly, and that was just to put out feelers about possible Breaches. Getting hard data, that could take weeks. Hell, it had taken six months just to learn about the LiaoCon ships.