Like a Boss (41 page)

The crowd had stilled again, and I got back to my feet. “It doesn’t have to end like that. Not if we all work together. And I mean
all
of us, Union and Freeborn alike. The Union can’t fix it as is, so we dissolve the Union and start over. We sit down, we talk, we work it out, and we make sure that we keep the lifter open and running until the end of time! Unless you want to be cut off from the rest of Occupied Space. Do you?”

I got a smattering of
No
s. That wouldn’t be enough. I needed a tsunami. “I know we all want independent lives. We want to make our own stuff and not have to rely on the Big Three for meds or parts. We
should
live like that. And we
will
. But first we gotta dig ourselves out of this hole we’re in. If the lifter goes, it’s going to get bad here, and fast. That’s why we need to start over
now
. It will be a whole lot of work, but it will be a lot less painful than sticking with Letty or letting WalWa pull the lifter up behind them.

“I know you’re willing to work. You did it today. You came
here
, hoping to see Letty get her ass kicked.” I looked up at her. “We’re not going to do that. We’re going to vote. Any member of the Union can call for a vote if there are enough of us assembled. It looks like we’re all here.

“So, here’s the question: do we stick with the way things are? Or do we start over?” I took a breath. “If we keep to the status quo, go ahead and go home. If we dissolve the Union and start over, sit down, right where you are.”

I sat down on the steps and tucked my feet under my legs.

Letty cleared her throat. “If I may interject?”

I sighed. “Enough of your bullshit, Letty.”

“Oh, this is no bullshit. I just want to know what you’re going to do with the fifty thousand yuan you got from the Union Treasury?”

I blinked. “What?”

She nodded, her smile growing. “In the middle of this crisis, when people are in desperate needs of funds, you just got a fifty thousand yuan payment.”

I blinked out of reflex and got a stab in the back of my eye. But I didn’t have to check my balance. Of course that money was there, right on time, like Letty said it would be. My head reeled. “You
authorized
that payment. A week ago.”

“Can you prove that?”

“No, because you had a goddamn scrambler!”

“Did I? You sure you didn’t make that up?”

“Jennifer, your bodyguard, was there.”

“And where is she now?”

I narrowed my eyes. “You know where she is. Out in the middle of that cane field where you shot her and her sister.”

The crowd stirred, but Letty’s smile didn’t fade. “That’s a nice move, shifting suspicion on me to cover up your own crimes. It’s the kind of thing we should expect from someone as mentally unstable as you.”

From my spot on the base of the steps, I could see a few people let go of the police and melt back into the crowd. I heard feet shuffling and saw ripples in the ocean of torsos and legs in front of me.

I stood up. “What do you want me to say, Letty? You wanted me to help stop this strike. You came to me and
begged
me to help you, and you said you’d knock fifty K off my debt. Do you think I’m so proud I wouldn’t take a lifeline? ’Cause I’m not. None of us are, not when we’ve been shit on for so long. And I don’t think anyone out there is going to hold that against me, especially when you haven’t offered them anything but misery and heartache.”

“And what are you offering? Hope? You can’t eat hope.”

“No, but hope can get us back to work. And that’s more than you’ve done.”

We stared at each other for a few minutes. Letty finally broke, and, when she looked away, her face broke out into a mad grin. “Look what hope’s got you.”

The streets were clear, save for a few hundred who had sat down. I looked at them and realized they were old or sick. They’d sat down because they had no energy to leave.

“Well, shit,” I said.

Letty laughed, high and clear. There was no malice in it. She just laughed and laughed until her machete thugs joined in. “I’m sorry, Padma,” she called down to me. “I really thought more people would stick around, but…” She laughed again. “Oh, God, I overestimated you. If I’d known
this
would be the result, I wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble.”

I took a breath and put my palms on the ground. “I’m not leaving, Letty,” I yelled over my shoulder. “I got nothing left you can take from me, so I’m hanging on to this.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, let it go!” She came down the steps until she was a meter above me. “You
lost
. You and the Union and Solidarity and all that crap. There’s just fear and hunger out there, and that’s all we’ve got. Maybe we’ll get some freakishly smart babies getting born to keep us aloft, but–”

A stream of silver shot into the sky, bursting into a blazing rainbow chrysanthemum. Four more followed, then a dozen, until the sky above Santee City glowed bright with fireworks. I looked back at Letty. “You really know how to rub it in.”

“This isn’t me,” she said, her face blank. She turned to run up the steps, but she vanished in a sudden puff of smoke. That got me to my feet, just in time for a riot cop to charge up the steps shouting, “GET DOWN, IDIOT!” She bowled me over, and I lost my footing and tumbled down the steps. In the blur, I heard popping and shouting. When I hit the sidewalk, my head and shoulder ached, and the air stank of rotting vanilla.

I looked up at the Union Hall. It was now surrounded by a wall of expanding riot foam. Armored police were running up the steps of the Hall and lobbing grenades or wrestling machete thugs to the ground. The fireworks kept exploding overhead as black-and-yellow bumblecars drove to the bottom of the steps.

And then the tuk-tuks roared up the street, a multicolored parade that
putt-putted
its way the length of Koothrapalli. One of them screeched to a halt in front of me, and Sirikit climbed out. “You okay?” she said as she helped me up. “I would have gotten here earlier, but we were clearing the last of the bombs out of our rides.”

“Did you get them all?”

“I hope so,” said Soni, walking down the steps. She had her face shield up and a giant slash across her armor’s chest plate. “They had about a hundred tuk-tuks wired to blow with these little fertilizer packages. It was sloppy work, but we had to check all of them. You have any idea how many tuk-tuks there are in this city?”

“I thought you were out of riot foam.”

“No, I
told
you we were out. I had no idea how much Letty knew, so there was no need for you to know.”

“Anything else I don’t need to know?”

“Only that you might be about to get what you wanted,” said Soni. “Look.”

The tuk-tuks had all cut their motors and their sound systems. The drivers got out and sat down next to their rides. And they started
singing
:

Sit down, just keep your seat

Sit down and rest your feet

Sit down, you got ’em beat

Sit down, sit down!

A chorus of voices rose from the side streets and joined the drivers for the next verse:

When the boss won’t talk go and take a walk – sit down, sit down!

When the boss sees that she’ll want a chat – sit down, sit down!

People streamed out of nowhere. They filled the streets right up to the edge of the Union Hall, and they sat down. Row after row of people, Union and Freeborn, all sitting down, all singing:

When they make a deal that’ll let them steal – sit down, sit down!

When they tell you lies and blind your eyes – sit down, sit down!

I pulled away from Sirikit and sat back down. Waves of people went back as far as I could see, all of them sitting down and singing. That song from Dead Earth had been inspired by a bunch of auto workers who had staged simultaneous sit-down strikes against their employer, some company whose corpse had been rolled into the Big Three centuries ago. They had held out against police and the state security agencies and the thugs their bosses had hired to break the strike. They kept their plants clean and organized, and they dealt with spies and dissension and all the other petty bullshit that happened when people got tired and hungry. In the end, they won, and their union organized every other auto plant in the country. Granted, that union got smashed to pieces forty years later, thanks to the rise of borderless corporatism, but what the hell. It was a good song.

I didn’t bother to count how many people showed up. It was more of a vote than I had hoped for. I looked back at the pile of foam where Letty had been. Three police had pulled her out and cuffed her. A fourth waved a red light stick in front of her face. Letty just sneered at them and yelled, “That won’t do any good. I already did it!”

I saw a flash and felt a
boom
, the low kind you get from a powerful explosion a long way away. Some of the crowd got to their feet and pointed northwest. I stood up and saw a thin line of black smoke rise above the rooftops.

“Shit,” said Sirikit. “We missed one. Where is that?”

I ran up the steps, my head swimming the whole way. At the top, I saw the smoke column curl, its underbelly lit by flashes of orange and red. The explosion had triggered a fire. What the hell was in that part of town? There weren’t any refineries, any machine shops, anything with a lot of fuel.

Or a lot of hydrocarbons.

Or a lot of
cane
.

I looked back at Letty, and my guts turned to ice. I ran down the steps and grabbed Sirikit’s arm. “We need to go,” I said. “Right now.”

“Where?”

“Tanque. The distillery.”

“But you don’t own it–”

“I don’t care! We need to go! Now!”

Sirikit didn’t hesitate. She walked to her tuk-tuk and shouted “MOVE!” The crowd parted like a well-lubed door, leaving us with a clear path up Solidarnoœæ. I jumped in behind Sirikit, and she floored it.

The seated crowd didn’t end as we tore away from the Hall. It branched off on every cross street we passed, all of these people sitting on the sidewalk or the street or their stoops or in front of their businesses. The workers who spun cable, the stevedores who unloaded canal boats, the drivers and cooks and strippers and priestesses, they were all outside, sitting down. I saw Freeborn faces next to Union faces, some of them angry, some of them weeping, all of them sitting.

“I know you’re not in the mood to hear this,” said Sirikit, “but it was really brave of you to say that in front of everyone. About the reason why you held on to the distillery.”

“There was nothing brave about it,” I said. “Letty wanted to use it as leverage, and the only way I could take away her power was to admit it myself. Everyone’s going to think I’m a drunk or a nutcase or both.”

“They’ll know you’re one of us,” said Sirikit. “You’re trying to get your shit together the best you can. We all are.”

“My best is a finger of rum and a candle.”

She shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect.”

A horn blatted behind us. I looked over my shoulder and saw a white Hanuman with ten people standing in the back. They waved and cheered. In the cab, Onanefe had his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, and he gave me a curt nod. I nodded back.

More joined us: delivery lorries and tankers and a lumbering fire truck. By the time we left the city, we were at the head of a column of fifty vehicles. As we passed the goat farm, I saw nothing ahead but smoke and flame. Some of the windbeasts were on their sides, knocked over by the blast. The dust flew thick, mixing with the stench of burning metal. My right hand ached, and I realized it was because I had curled it into a fist so tight my nails had cut into my palm.

We slowed in front of the distillery. The air was full of the stench of ash and burnt caramel. A giant smoldering hole sat in front of the press house, and a slightly smaller hole had been blown through the wall. The curing house was nothing but a roaring fire. I had Sirikit make a circle around the place, but we were stopped by the flaming wreckage of the press. The giant cylinders had been blasted through the press house wall, and all the cane juice embedded in them had caught fire. They glowed a dull red.

Onanefe and his crew got to work, as did everyone else with firefighting experience. There wasn’t any risk to my neighbors, as the grasslands that surrounded the distillery were too green to catch fire. I just sat in Sirikit’s tuk-tuk and watched them work. As much as I wanted to run in and grab everything I could, I would only get in the way.

Within thirty minutes, the fire was out. Onanefe walked over, his clothes streaked black. “Not much left,” he said.

I sighed. “Fortunately, I now have that fifty thousand you say I owe you.”

He shrugged. “Don’t worry about that.”

“No, I pay my debts, even when I’m not sure they’re really mine.” I looked at the ruins. “The new owners are gonna be pissed. Whoever they are.”

He wiped his brow. “This is gonna take lawyers, isn’t it? Man, I hate dealing with them.”

“Me, too,” I said. “But if you find someone good, keep ’em. A good lawyer can save your life.”

I got out of the tuk-tuk and walked around, Sirikit and Onanefe trailing behind me. The buildings were gutted, and any machinery had turned to slag. Broken bottles crunched under our boots, and the ashes from labels floated in the air. “What the hell am I going to do now?” I said to no one in particular.

Onanefe held out a hand. “Come on. Come on out of this place. Come back to town. We have a lot of work to do, and people are going to count on you to show them the way.”

“That’s going to be a neat trick once my brain seizes up.” The Fear hissed in assent.
I can’t wait
.

“You talked to
one
doctor,” said Sirikit. “And you kept your treatment a secret. There are lots of other people to talk with, and you know they’ll all want to help. It’s what we do, right?”

“So you believed my bullshit, too?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t bullshit. It was the truth. We’re all here on this rock, and we either help each other out or cut each other down. I’d rather help.”