Her Majesty's Western Service (2 page)

From a heavy steel ventilation grate came the grinding of the underway chains, massive conveyor belts that rumbled day-in, day-out to haul passenger cars under the city. It took a staff of three twelve-hundred-man shifts to keep them oiled and smooth.

More men serving machines
, thought Marko, and spat down the grate.

“Mister? Got a dime?” asked a scrawny waif with a tin cup, as they waited to cross Seventy-Fifth. Steam-driven freight trucks rumbled past in front of them, rubberized tarpaulins covering their loads. “I gotta eat, mister. Got a dime?”

“Go buy yourself a couple houses,” said Marko, and tossed him two of the intricately-foiled Exchequer five-thousands.

The urchin studied the unfamiliar bills and spat.

“Thanks for nothing, shithead.” He contemptuously ripped them in half, threw them away. “Food
comes
in wrappers.”

Krushchev ignored the exchange, and rumbling machinery from the factories obscured conversation for the next two blocks. A cigar vendor wearing the elaborate livery of his brand, a tray against his chest, was good-naturedly bantering with a burly firefighter in a heavy, asbestos-threaded
, red-and-black uniform.

A pair of tipsy, middle-aged clericals in dull beige suits staggered up from a dive-bar, one of them tapping his pipe out onto the sidewalk.

“Girls, girls? We got girls!” shouted a pimp's crier in a bright purple peaked-cap.

“Dr. Mephistopheles
’ Serum,” said a coatless teenager with bright green braces and a pouch of advertising flyers. “Cure anything, only two dollars!” He tried to shove one of the flyers into Marko's hand; he pushed the kid away.

A pneumatic mail-tube, six-inch reinforced-glass segments between brass joins, emerged from a sidewalk switching-box into a building of low-grade shops and cheap offices.

For a moment, the kaleidoscope of light, refraction and deep shadow became smoothly bright as the spotlight from an overhead dirigible passed over them.

“Speelys! Speelys!” shouted a man with a pouch of handbills. “Porno speelys, just a buck! Porno speelys, best in the world, just twenty-five feet and a buck from you!”

“One of the great cities of the world,” said Krushchev.

“Wouldn't it be wonderful to see the place burn?” asked Marko.

They passed Meer Park, the northeast and last remnant of the huge park that until about forty years ago had ruled the center of Manhattan. A beer vendor – and, doubtless, harder stuff under the flat – was doing a healthy business; a busker with a set of bagpipes played at the ornately-gated entrance.

“More anarchy like this, wouldn't you think?” Krushchev said. “Look. Utter chaos. Everyone out for himself. Fighting” – he gestured at a couple of bruised workers being ejected from a bar by a huge black bouncer –

“Stealing” – at a young man darting across the street, vaulting over the brass-and-chromed rear boiler of a steam-car, a pocketbook clutched in his other hand –

“Whoring” – a pimp, accepting money from a grizzled-looking type in a cheap fedora -

“And trying to raise hell” – a two-bit agitator whose broken-nosed face Marko vaguely recognized, shouting something incoherent outside the entrance to an underway station.

"The more complex, the bigger the explosion,” Marko shrugged. “Set this place on fire? The riots of the `80s – let alone the `29 Surge – would be
nothing
compared to how this place would blow now.”

“And replace it with dead stiffness. Martial law. The Metropolitans, Guard and Army would shoot on sight. Nobody moved without a permit. They didn't want a repeat of the
Crash. I was here in `29. Remember?”

Marko shrugged again.

“Sorting out the pieces is your job. I just break things.”

Past 110th, industrial slums began to slowly ease into a more respectable neighborhood. Cops were on foot, in pairs and sometimes singly. Flashing display lights advertised a kinematograph parlor; a pair of buskers, fiddle and accordion, stood in a doorway with an open violin-case in front of them.

A cop, rather than standing alert as he would have in rougher industrial country, was chatting with the driver of an electrovelocipede, with the checked-black-and-yellow generator-block and passenger-seat indicating a cab-for-hire.

“Where're we going?” Marko asked Krushchev, as they crossed another underway grating.

“To meet some people, I said.”

They passed – one looked as though he was going to shoulder Krushchev out of the way – a pair of shaven-headed men in black, the silver double-lightning-bolt insignia on their
collars denoting them as German mercenaries, one or another of the units on Federal contract below the Mason-Dixon.

“You get all kinds here,” Krushchev noted.

“Which people?” Marko persisted.

Krushchev glanced back; Marko followed his look. One of the German mercenaries was arguing with a political pamphleteer they’d seen twenty feet back. His friend stood ready, fists already drawn, and a cop was pointedly looking the other way.

“People who're going to fuck things up. People who'll help you fuck things up.”

“Then let's get there. There's a reason we're walking, and not riding, twenty-plus blocks?”

Joe Ferrer looked around the bar with distaste. More pseudos and wannabes, he thought. More talk and noise.

No
action
, although that was what he'd been promised. Tonight was the night he'd meet serious people who were really
fighting
the System. Not pseudo revolutionaries who thought that passing out drivelous pamphlets about the Marxian dialectic, whatever the hell
that
was - a language variation? - constituted rebellion.

Not idiot dilettantes, middle-class children who thought that strumming bad sitar ballads about oppression was the same as a blow against it.

Not drunken industrials, blue-collar cogs who'd finally become aware that they
were
no more than abused cogs, less-educated but no less fucked over than he was, but who saw revolution as no more than a loud excuse to rowdily do what they'd have done anyway.

So far, he was disappointed. The drunken industrials weren't here - this, as much a coffee shop as a bar, on Eighth and 143rd, wasn't their kind of place - but the other types were. A less-than-skilled harpist and a drummer were making loud, electrically-amplified noise at the other end of the room, while a poet declaimed meaningless noise about the ‘corporate industrial system.’

Whatever the hell
that
was. All Ferrer knew was that he'd been screwed. Hard. Once too many times. The corporations, with Washington's full legal backing, had ripped him off. A patent,
his
patent, stolen. Millions for them, nothing for him, despite clear paperwork.

Not the first time, the second. The first, he'd accepted it for the sake of his employers; a stable job for Federal Electric was worth something, right? He'd swallowed it, accepted the
bonus, despite the fact that the work had been done on his own time in his own shop using his own tools, and allowed them to take the application. They'd fired him three months later anyhow.

The second time, he'd been much more careful about filing patents and paperwork. And they'd ripped him off anyway, blatantly.

“It’ll cost you five thousand dollars to hire lawyers to contest it,” one of FE's lawyers had said. “You don't have five thousand dollars. You won't find it easily. They won't win in any case. Thanks for the designs.”

Ferrer's fist clenched,
hard
, at the memory.

I'll stomp those bastards. I will teach them. Once was enough. Twice is more than enough. I'll see their high-rises burn around their ears. I'll see their high-rise offices and their whole fucking system burn around their fucking thieving ears
.

“Mister?” It was one of the waitresses.

“Yes?” Ferrer said.

“They want you in back. Joe Ferrer, right?”

“That's me.”

“I bring you another drink? Going to be closed room, they say.”

“Triple Scotch. I'll wait.”

The waitress gave him what might have been a Look
; you're too old to be in a place like this
, perhaps, because Ferrer was forty-two and not many others in here were above thirty. Or perhaps it was just the hard alcohol; most of the others were smoking marijuana or chewing khat, with beer the heaviest drink in general circulation.

When she came back, Ferrer gave her a buck and headed into the rear of the place.

“You here to meet - you're Mr. Ferrer?” asked a young man with streaked black-and-white hair.

“That's me.”

“Up those stairs, first on the left.”

Ferrer followed the directions, up a tight staircase. The walls had been pencilled-on with crazy triangular and square designs, triple-thick charcoal lines added here and there for emphasis.

It's not engineering. Maybe it's some fucked-up kind of art. Hell if I know
.

Ferrer had been hanging around beatie and agitprop circles for far, far too long - two years was
plenty
long-enough in his book - to have much appreciation for that kind of rubbish. Posers, he thought they were.
Posers, pseudos and wannabes the lot of you. Don't want to bring down the system. Just want to ride it, play the cute rebel over shit they - the real System, the Imperials and their Fed corporate puppets - don't give a damn about in the first place, as you all know full well.

The doorway the man had indicated led to a small room with a rectangular table and a number of chairs. A man in buckskins came in behind Ferrer. They took the last two chairs.

Ferrer glanced around. Most prominent was a tall, very lean, dark-skinned man with a flowing moustache and a big, bright ring in his right ear. He stood at the end of the table. To his right was a stocky, white-haired man in a trenchcoat.

There was a spectacled man in his late twenties with gelled black hair and shifty, darting eyes, a red-haired woman of about the same age who, as Ferrer studied her, lit a new cigarette with her old one and stubbed the old one into a clay ashtray. There was himself, and the man in buckskins, who was tall, brown-haired, well-built and about forty-five.

“Thank you for coming,” said the white-haired man. His accent had a trace of Russian in it. “My name is Nick. I'm associated with a foreign government and you wouldn't have passed our screening in the first place if you couldn't guess which. This is Theron Marko. He'll be in charge.”

Nods in the direction of the lean, dark-skinned man in black, who smiled.

Needs a dentist
, was Ferrer's first thought.

If I'm taking orders from him
-

Well, this
was
a break. No loud declamations about the system. People were getting straight down to business.

“You people have been selected,” Nick said, “because, one, you're available. Two, because you're
damn
good at what you do, or suited for it. Let me go around the table. Good people tend to be modest.
I'll
do the introductions. Does anyone have a problem?”

If anyone did, none of them said so.

“Pete Rienzi,” Nick indicated the shifty-eyed man with the spectacles. “Engineering student turned killer. Spun it as manslaughter, got lucky with the judge and only served five years. Still couldn't get a job out. You've got half a master's in electrical technology, a criminal record, and two more killings since you got out.”

“That's me,” Rienzi half-waved a hand.

“You're going to be the assistant to Joe Ferrer here. Bachelor's in engineering from Jersey Technical, master's in electrical technology from Columbia, six years at American Kinematograph Corporation and then nine at Federal Electric before they
royally
fucked him over; stole two patents of his, the lesser of which they've made four hundred thousand from. It's a pity it took such a fucking-over to get a corporate drone to see the light, but see the light he did. The first, we hope, of a very great number.”

Ferrer nodded firmly. Looked at Rienzi.

In this kind of thing, you have to be ready to kill
, he thought.
Knew
that
when I started to get in. He's probably as much my bodyguard, but he'd better know his work, whatever this is, or be able to learn.

“Pratt Cannon,” the man called Nick gestured at the man in buckskins. “Born in the Republic of Deseret. Did a hitch in their army, sergeant of horse cavalry, before deciding life was more fun on the other side of the mountain. Mercenary scout for Sonora, Texas, the Feds and a dozen private outfits. Killed twenty men in gunfights and dry-gulched three times that number.”

Pratt Cannon coughed loudly.

“Dry-gulching implies murder, Mr. Nick. Out where I'm from, bad manners to say that. Sort of bad manners that might get a man killed.”