Like a Boss (25 page)

I nodded. “Think you can help me out?” I rattled the cuffs.

She gave me the once-over, then turned back into her seat. “After we get to Tanque.”

The driver shifted into the gear, and the ambulance lurched forward. My guts shifted. Of course I didn’t have any Ten-Year at the distillery. I didn’t have any, period, but now was not the time to reveal that bit of poor business planning. I had to get out of here.

I reached for Soni, but the handcuff chain was too short. The vertical bars on the gurney’s handrail kept me from sliding closer to her. I reached across with my left hand, but I still couldn’t reach her. Then I realized I was, indeed, a dumbass. I was still dancing, and dancers moved in all directions.

I put my back to the gurney and reached out my left hand. I got a firm grip on Soni’s collar and pulled. She flopped to the ground in front of me. I pulled on her collar again, only to have her blouse come untucked. I gave it another yank; her blouse tore at the seams in her armpits, revealing a simple body armor vest. She didn’t move.

“What’s going on?” yelled the driver.

“Nothing. Make sure to avoid the Brapati Causeway. It’ll be jammed.”

I reached for Soni’s belt, but it was too far. I tugged on her wrist. She slid toward me until her boot caught in the gurney’s wheels. I pulled harder, but that only made the gurney rattle. Above me, Onanefe groaned, “Oy, my
head
.” The ambulance bumped over something, and he tumbled on top of Soni.

The EMT with cornrows stepped through the partition and stopped. It must have been a hell of a scene: me tugging on an unconscious and shirtless Soni as Onanefe made apologies and tried to get to his feet in the cramped space. The EMT held up the syringe. “I really wanted to save this for people who need it.”

“You can just let us go,” I said.

She shook her head. “I got mouths to feed. Those bottles will go a long way.”

Onanefe looked up. “Bottles?”

The EMT loomed over Onanefe. I couldn’t reach Soni’s belt, but I could reach her hand, the other that held the taser. I grabbed it, flicked off the safety, and fired. The EMT shuddered as fifty thousand volts locked her muscles. She collapsed on top of Onanefe, who yelped.

The driver screeched to a halt and killed the bubble lights. He couldn’t get in through the partition, so he ran to the back and threw open the doors. For a moment, all I saw was his darkened outline against the starry night sky. The syringe in his hand flashed in the light, and I lashed out with a boot to his nose. He flew backwards, his head smacking on the pavement.

Onanefe shoved the EMT off him and surveyed the scene. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

“Such trouble. Help me get her on the gurney.”

Onanefe looked at the two unconscious women. “Which one?”

“Soni, the cop.”

“Why her?”

I rattled the handcuff. “Oh,” he said. We got her on the gurney, and I searched her belt. No key. “Look on the floor, maybe the key fell.”

Sirens floated over the night air. “We don’t have time,” said Onanefe. “Come on!”

“I’m a little stuck!”

“Then we bring her with us.”

It was awkward as hell, but we got the gurney out of the ambulance. We had stopped in a darkened residential block, not unlike the one we’d left. In fact, the more I looked around, the more I realized we’d only gone around in circles. “We’re still in Howlwadaag,” I said.

“You sure?”

I pointed at the rowhouses. “Those EMTs, they were in on it.”

“On what?”

“It, the… you know what? Let’s get inside before someone tries to kill us again, okay? And then we can talk.”

A high-pitched howl, that hunting sound, bounced off the houses. “Yeah, that works for me,” said Onanefe. He grabbed two bags of medical supplies and tossed them onto the gurney between Soni’s legs. We rolled away from the ambulance as quickly as we could, the gurney’s wheels rattling and bouncing over the damp, cracked pavement.

Fifteen nerve-shattering minutes later, we found an abandoned konbini. The door hung from its hinges, and the shelves that remained standing had been picked clean. The smell from smashed jars hung in the air: chutney and pickles and yogurt going bad. A wet spot on the floor slipped me up, and I went down, my cuffed wrist catching on the handrail. I bit my lower lip to keep from yelling.

The back office was open and emptied. The gurney’s wheels bumped against the legs of a small, overturned desk. With some choice shoving and cussing, we got Soni inside. I dug a chemical light out of the medical bag and cracked it. The room took on a sickly green glow, made even worse when Onanefe closed the office door behind us. Soni’s gentle snoring filled the room.

I sat on the gurney. “Well, I’d say I’ve been in worse situations, but I’d be lying. This is bad.”

Onanafe nodded. “How long do you think your friend will be out?”

“No idea. You only got a couple of CCs. Looks like she took the full load.”

“Is there anything that could wake her up?”

I looked in the medical bag. “Probably.”

“Do you know anything about medicine?”

“Nope. You?”

“Nope.”

“Terrific.”

Soni snorted, then resumed her slow, steady breathing.

“She’s going to be
pissed
when she wakes up,” I said. “Too bad I can’t restrain
her
.”

We checked her again for handcuff keys, but found nothing. At least I had time to look over the gurney’s handrail construction. It was made of three horizontal aluminum pipes fastened to two verticals. The whole thing could collapse, thanks to the rivets punched through the horizontals. The rivets wouldn’t budge, but the verts were bolted to the frame of the gurney. Four hex-head bolts held it in place; I could unscrew the nuts and only remain attached to a bunch of pipework. At least it would be portable. I took out my trusty multi-tool, snapped the pliers into place, and got to work.

“I imagine someone will come looking for her,” said Onanefe. “It’s not like police chiefs are allowed to vanish in the middle of a crisis.”

“Unless someone wants her to.” I told Onanefe about Soni’s getting locked out of police decisions and her suspicions about Bakaara.

Onanefe brushed his mustache. “You don’t think those EMTs are part of this, do you? I mean, attacking your friend and all.”

“Ah,” I said, catching the first nut as it fell free into my palm. “No, that was probably me.” I told him about the bribe. By the time I was done, Onanefe’s mouth hung open.

“
Ten-Year
? You’re sitting on a cache of
Ten-Year
?”

“Of course I’m not! There is no such thing as Ten-Year!” I got to work on the second nut. “Tonggow sold the last batch before I took over.”

“But everyone says–”

“Everyone says exactly what Tonggow had fed them and what
I
have fed them,” I said. “It’s not anything special. I mean,” and I started laughing here, “if I had rum that expensive, don’t you think I’d have sold it? Don’t you think I would have bought a ship and crewed it and sailed from one end of Occupied Space to the other instead of staying here?”

Onanefe cocked his head, and he smiled. “No. I think you’d have stayed here regardless. I think you like this place.”

The second nut came loose, then slipped out of my grip. I let it go. It’s not like I needed to put the handrail back together. “Really? What gives you that impression?”

“You’re working way too hard to hang on to what you’ve got. You’re tied into Santee like the most radical member of the FOC. This place is in your blood.”

“That’s a really nice load of crap you’re selling,” I said, struggling with the third nut. It had gone on cock-eyed, and the bolt had been partially stripped. “No wonder you guys don’t have a seat at the table.”

“Why do so many people come here? Why not any other Union-run world?”

“Because it’s the last resort before jumping Beyond.”

“But it hasn’t always been. Santee is
special
.” He closed his eyes as he took a breath. “It’s that feeling when the wind comes in off the ocean at dusk. All those smells, all these people, all this
life
. People hear about Santee, about how good we got it, even when we’re working our asses off or we’re at each other’s throats. This is a good place that we’ve made. Don’t you think?”

The third nut refused to budge. I rattled the bolt, pounded it with the butt of the multi-tool, but it remained stuck. I looked at the remaining nut and hoped removing it would be enough. Maybe I could just pry the thing loose. I got to work on the fourth nut, hoping it wouldn’t surprise me. “You know I used to be a Union recruiter, right? You don’t have to sell me on this place.”

He chuckled. “Sorry. Force of habit.” He watched me unscrew the nut. “You miss it? Recruiting?”

The nut spun away. “Not anymore. It was really fun when I started out. Traffic was great, so it was easy to convince people to jump ship. I could just borrow a rooftop transmitter and blast the Public’s live feed into space. People would slide down the cable just to see what was going on down here. They’d had it with being Indentures. Most of them fit in nicely. A few didn’t. But none of them ever went to Thronehill to turn themselves in. They were done with being property.” I tapped the tattoo on my cheek. “I hope you never go through that. No matter how much I got paid or how good the bennies were, I always knew I belonged to Walton Warumbo Universal Unlimited. I could be replaced, just like any old part.”

The fourth nut fell free and danced on the pourform floor for a moment. I scooped it up and showed it to Onanefe. “All the training, all the schooling, all the pats on the back, I might as well have been this. Once I was no longer useful, I would be removed and tossed aside, stuck into some other slot that WalWa thought needed filling.” I tossed the nut into a corner of the office. “Give me a hand, would you, please?”

We rolled the gurney against the wall and collapsed the sides so the bed was only a few centimeters above the floor. We put our backs to the opposite wall and grabbed the handrail. I planted my feet on the gurney’s frame and nodded at him to follow suit.

“I don’t know how much help I’ll be with this busted rib,” said Onanefe, grunting as he put his boots on the rails.

“Just do what you can. Ready?”

He nodded.

We pulled on the handrail. The bar strained against the stripped nut, and I could swear the thing moved a few millimeters closer to us. Onanefe huffed and puffed. “A break, please.”

We relaxed. I kept my grip on the handrail, willing the nut to turn into gelatin. It didn’t comply. “Did you have anything to do with the strike?” I asked.

Onanefe took a moment before shaking his head. “Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved for us to strike. I have a list of demands as long as my arm, but what I didn’t have was a disciplined movement. It’s easy to get angry people to march, but a strike? That’s a different beast.” He nodded at me. “You know what it’s like, right? Making sure the demands are clear, keeping people on the picket lines, making sure no one folds and goes home when they’re tired of occupying the manager’s office.”

I nodded. “It sucks.”

“It does indeed.” He gripped the handrail again. “Which is why this has been such a disaster. It’s going to set us back until after
this
Contract. All of us.”

“If we aren’t killed first.”

We pulled again. This time, I heard the distinct whine of metal on metal; the nut was giving way. I hoped it was weaker than the handrail, or this would be for naught.

Onanefe begged off, and we relaxed. “So, the FOC isn’t getting people to leave the kampong?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ve no doubt they’re stirring the pot. The problem is that they’re not working with a recipe. There are a couple of hotheads who’ve been screaming for us to
do something
, but none of those somethings have been enough. No one wants to negotiate. No one wants to talk. And I’m talking about doing that with the other Freeborn. We’re not this monolith, you know.”

“Neither is the Union,” I said. “That was always the part I hated the most: convincing people to quit being stupid and just listen to me.”

He snorted. “Well, with a pitch like that, how could they refuse?”

I waved him off. “I’m bright enough not to say it like that to their faces, even though that’s the job. My first organizing gig was when WalWa wanted to shut down the micro-cleaner plant at Brushhead.”

He nodded. “I remember that. Didn’t you guys strip the place clean?”

I grinned. “That part everyone knows about, because I made sure to tell as many people as possible. What I didn’t talk about was the incredible hassle of getting all those people to go into the plant in the first place.”

He made a face. “You kidding? I thought anyone with ink would be happy to smash a Big Three facility into tiny pieces.”

“And you’d be right. But that would have solved nothing. Everyone would have been out of work, which meant they wouldn’t have gotten paid, which meant they couldn’t make rent, and on and on until your jobless angry mob is a jobless, homeless,
hungry
, angry mob. We had to make a point to WalWa, and we had to get something for ourselves in the process. No one wanted to listen. They just wanted to break things.”

“What did you do?”

I smiled. “I did the work. I talked with every floor manager, every worker, every spouse. I found out they were fine with losing their jobs – ’cause the jobs sucked – but they were worried about where they’d live. One of them, this extruder tech named Mesh Lollabrigida, she had the bright idea to turn the plant into housing. And that meant bringing in architects, builders, all the people who could make that happen. And no one wanted to do it, not for free, anyway. The Union didn’t want to pay for it, the employees didn’t have the cash to pool together, and the whole thing would have fallen apart except for me bullshitting everyone into it.”

I laughed at the memory. “I had this one machinist, a guy named Giacomo Teff, who was great at taking lathes apart. There were six in there, big industrial pieces, and they were obsolete and dangerous. Every couple of months, they’d slip a gear and change speed, and some poor operator would lose control of whatever they were working on and get sent to the hospital. He was the only one who keep them working.