Like a Boss (40 page)

“What?” said Li-Han.

“But we need them to buy our cane,” said Annie. “And we need all the stuff they make.”

“Because we aren’t making it ourselves, and we’re not doing that because we don’t have the right people. We don’t have the right people because we’re waiting for them to come shimmying down the cable. And that doesn’t happen because the Big Three limit the traffic we get. And doesn’t that piss you off? You came all the way to be free from them, but we still depend on them. We still need them because we say we do.”

Danica scratched her nose. “So… we don’t?”

“Not the way they think we do.” My brain itched, but in that good way, the way it always did when I was lost in work and didn’t care about anything else. I had a few of those moments when I was still with WalWa, but they were so infrequent they didn’t really count. Keeping track of logistics for sports stadiums was nothing compared to taking apart the old brush factory or pulling Breaches from the ocean or just going down a list of people’s complaints and resolving them, one by one. No matter the problem’s size, I fixed it, and that mattered. I did the work. We all did the work.

“We all do the work,” I muttered. That was it.

I looked at the clock: five-thirty. I tamped down the panic about not having any Old Windswept and stood up. “Come on. We need to get to the Hall. All of us. Tell everyone you see to get there. Freeborn, too.”

Annie groaned. “But they won’t come.”

“They will, because we’re going to listen to what they want, and they’re going to get it. We’re all going to get it, and we’re not going to take Letty’s bullshit. We’re not just going to ask her to step down. We’re undoing everything and starting over.”

They all looked at each other. “Padma, what are you going on about?”

I took a deep breath so I could focus on this tiny bubble of an idea. “We need to dissolve the Union and start over. We need to get rid of these barriers between us and the Freeborn because we are all so much stronger together. We have the one thing the Big Three need: cane. And not just us on Santee. I’m talking every world in Occupied Space that grows the stuff. The Big Three are completely dependent on us for fuel. That means
we
have the power, and we are going to bloody well seize it. Together.”

I walked out of the break room, not waiting for them to follow me. I knew they would. Whether they would go along with what I was proposing was another matter. Dissolve the Union and start over? That would be an insane amount of work. It would be decades of work, and the Contract was up for renegotiation in, what, four months? Wouldn’t that just plunge us into more trouble?

I passed the back of Lam’s Butcher Shop. Two skinny dogs snarled and fought over a rib bone, each taking turns snatching it from each other’s mouth. The back door to Lam’s was wide open, and I saw a freshly butchered hog hanging on a hook. Its snout almost touched the floor. Lam must have been feeling pretty good about business to have a whole hog ready for sale.

That was us. Freeborn and Union, bickering over who got more of the scraps while the Big Three had a whole feast within reach. We would keep up this idiotic cycle until we started working together. The first Union people got that, but they got caught up in protecting the institution itself. That the Union was worthless without a constant stream of new members wasn’t lost on the Big Three. No wonder they had shunted traffic from Santee. We didn’t just lose them money. We were an actual threat.

I hadn’t seen that when I was a recruiter. I thought the work would be easy because who didn’t want out of their horrible Indentures? Who wouldn’t want cane from Santee Anchorage? There would always be ships coming by until there weren’t. The Big Three would seed another planet with cane, let it fester for a while, then move on. The Union might get a foothold, but it wouldn’t be enough. Not unless we all worked together.

Ten blocks away from the Hall, and the crowds were already thick. I nudged my way through, and people gave me smiles or pats on the back as I worked toward the Hall.
We’re with you
, they said. I sure hoped they would be after what I had to say.

Soni and a hundred police officers stood at the front of the crowd. They formed a perimeter around the Hall. I stopped long enough to give Soni a hug before climbing the steps. Letty stood at the top, surrounded by fifty of her machete thugs. She smiled as I approached, then held up something.

It was a triangular bottle made of bumpy, sea-green glass. She held it label-out, but I didn’t have to see it. I knew what it was. She knew what it was. She unscrewed the cap, and the seal cracked, a sound like a gunshot.

“Buy you a drink?” she said. She held the bottle at her side, at arm’s length.

The clock tower behind her chimed six.

I looked at the bottle. It was perfect, like it had just been filled and capped this morning. Lots of other distillers liked aging their rum in the bottle, but Estella Tonggow never did, so I never did. It wasn’t just a matter of the pharmacology; I thought it tasted better. I wanted to taste it again. And again. And again.

The six chimes of the clock echoed off the buildings. I took a step toward Letty, and she spilled a little rum on the pavement. “Oops,” she said. I backed off.

“If you want it, you’ll tell everyone to go home,” she said. “You’ll go back to your job. You’ll quit talking about having me sent up or dissolving the Union or whatever it is you’ve done over the past day.”

“Or?”

She splashed more rum on the pavement. “This is the last bottle. I checked and double-checked. All of your stashes are blown up, and every bar in the city that sells it has found their inventories reduced. Maybe if you run back to work, you can smell the last of it getting flushed down the toilet.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the bottle. “The distillery can always make more.”

“But not the way you did,” she said. “The new owners are going to mess with the process, trim out all those inefficiencies that Tonggow baked in. They’ll buy cheaper cane, use different barrels. You need things to stay just the way they are, Padma. You and I know it.” She cocked her head. “Or maybe everyone else needs to know it, too. I wonder, how will it look when everyone finds out that you’re nothing but a functional alcoholic?”

I swallowed. “I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first.”

“No, you certainly wouldn’t.” Letty swirled the bottle around, the rum forming a dark vortex. “I learned a lot about the people who had my job, and they were just as corrupt and clueless as you’d expect. Some of them were good, but the rest…” She shrugged. “They were content to do less. Just let things slide.”

“Not like you, though.”

She shook her head. “I could see the way things were going back when I was in the FOC. The Big Three would kill as much traffic as they could, and they’d extract as much cane as they could, and then they’d be done with us.” She brought the bottle to her side. “You know what’s going to happen, come Contract Time? There won’t be any Slots. WalWa is going to withdraw from Santee Anchorage. They’re going to shut down Thronehill, go into orbit, and pull the lifter up behind them. We’re too much trouble.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded. “It’s all in their preliminaries. There’s a lot of talk about traffic forecasts and cutbacks on staff. I can read between the lines. They’re done with Santee.”

“So why do all this? Why the bombings and the strike?”

“To shake everyone out of their comas,” she said. “We have to prepare. We have to get used to a different life. One that’s going to be hard.”

“Then you don’t do it by blowing up the city!”

“That was being efficient. I got people scared
and
I knocked out your stashes.”

“Why the hell are you picking me out of the crowd, Letty? What have I ever done to you?”

“Nothing. It’s what you
could
do that worries me.”

“What?” I said. “What could I possibly do to hurt you?”

She nodded at the street. I turned, and my breath caught in my throat. I saw nothing but people for ten blocks in every direction. I allowed myself a smile.

“You talk, and you believe,” said Letty. “What’s more, you also know how to temper that belief with reality. Someone like Saarien, he believes, but he doesn’t question. He sees opportunity, he works within the system to get his way, but he will never question The Struggle.” She pointed at me. “You do. You have. And you convince people to come along with your way of thinking. It’s easy to scare people, but to inspire them? To get them to think of more than themselves? That’s hard. I can’t do it. You can. And that’s why you have to step aside. Or else.” She shook the bottle.

I think she means it
, said The Fear. I looked at her, looked at the bottle. I could make that last a year. In that year, I could round up enough of Old Windswept’s new shareholders to make sure the place didn’t change. Hell, I could find new investors, enough to have a stake in the process. In that year, I could scour every single building on this planet and find any bottles that had been squirreled away. There was no way Letty had found all of them.

She took a swig from the bottle, and all I could think about was leaping on her and pounding that smirk off her face. The crowd would love that. They would tear the machete thugs to pieces to protect me. They would make me their fucking queen, and I would
command
them to make me an endless supply of Old Windswept rum. And if WalWa left and shut down the lifter, well, I’d live out my days presiding over a sybaritic paradise. To hell with the future. We would live in the now. It would be glorious, the kind of life only available to the people at the highest level of the Life Corporate. Just the thing I’d signed up for when I became an Indenture.

Except that I knew that was bullshit. I looked at the faces below, all those people from my neighborhood, my city, my planet. Soni and her beat cops held hands as they formed a black-and-yellow line around the crowd. Big Lily and her staff passed around cups of water to everyone nearby. Khamala al-Jones and members of her congregation held their hands to their faces, breathing their prayers out and up. So did people clustered around Archbishop Yoon and Rabbi vaigdë and everyone from every church and temple and coven in the city. The Freeborn hung together, but I could see them holding hands with Union people. Onanefe was out there, and KajSiab, and Sirikit, and all those kids who’d been swept up in Saarien’s church because they knew they needed to be a part of
something
bigger that was willing to fight for their future. Hell, even Saarien himself was there, his arm in a sling made from the ruins of his suit jacket. I gave him a nod, and he nodded back.

I looked at the bottle, I looked at Letty, and I walked down the steps until I was within shouting distance of the crowd. “If your pai is working,” I called out, “please turn it on and start streaming. Ask people to turn on Public terminals. Repeat it for anyone without a pai. I need to talk with everyone, and I want to make sure you all hear me.”

There was a furious wave of blinking and whispering. After a minute, Soni tapped her temple and gave me a nod:
You’re on
. I took a breath, feeling my face grow numb at what I was about to say, so I said it.

“When I was in transit to Santee, WalWa used a new batch of hibernant. That was part of being an Indenture – we were all test subjects, whether we liked it or not. We weren’t people. We were just units, and damaged units are a part of business.

“The hibernant damaged my brain. I don’t dream. I know I’ve used that line in fundraisers, but it’s true. And it’s not the only thing.”

You wouldn’t
, hissed The Fear.

Fuck you
, I hissed back.

“I started to lose focus, and then I started to hear a voice in my head. A single voice, and all it did was cut me down and make me question everything I did, whether it was tying my boots or breathing. I call it The Fear, and it ran my life until I went to see Dr Ropata. He told me my brain was waiting, that it had been on hold during transit.”

The crowd tittered.

“I know, I told him that sounded like bullshit. He agreed, but it was the best he could do with the medical tech we have. He gave me a treatment, and it has kept The Fear at bay for the past thirteen years.” I smiled. “I go home at six o’clock, I light a candle, I think about my place in the universe, and I have a sip of Old Windswept. And that’s why I worked so hard to buy the distillery, because I wanted to make sure the supply never ran out.”

That got the crowd going. People talked to each other, pointed at me. A few of them made
drinky-drinky
motions with their hands.

I pointed back at Letty. “She has, as far as I can tell, the last bottle of Old Windswept on the planet. She blew up every place I’d stashed rum, and she’s cleaned out every other bottle around. If you ever bought rum from me or Estella Tonggow, tell me I’m wrong. Tell me your Old Windswept is still safe and sound.”

The hubbub died down. Holy shit, Letty really had done it.

“She wants me to tell you all to go home, just so I can get my hands on that last bottle. She wants us all to go back to our lives, to pretend that none of this happened. She wants all this because there’s some seriously bad shit coming our way, and she doesn’t have what it takes to lead us.”

That got their attention. I turned back to Letty, whose haughty grin had turned to terror. She shook her head.
You wouldn’t.
I gave her the finger and turned to the crowd. “There isn’t going to be another Contract. WalWa is leaving Santee Anchorage, and they’re going to pull the lifter up with them as they go. They’re cutting us off from the rest of Occupied Space.”

Letty yelled something, and the machete thugs started scraping their blades on the steps. The police tensed, and the crowd behind them stepped through their line to link arms. Soni started yelling for people to stay where they were, and the machetes clacked on the pavement.

No, not today. “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS!” I yelled. I yelled it again and again until my throat hurt. When my voice gave out, I fell to one knee. I was so fucking tired. I just wanted another bowl full of curried noodles, some head, and a nap. Was that too much to ask for?