"Go by the room tag manifest for their ages. Don't assume kids are as young as they look. Or old folks, for that matter. You come from somewhere that restricts life extension rights, don't you?" Svengali shrugged. "At least most of the Lolitas have a handle on how to behave in public, unlike dumb-as-a-plank there. Damn good thing, that, it can be really embarrassing when the eight-year-old you're trying to distract with a string of brightly dyed handkerchiefs turns out to have designed the weaving machine that made them. Anyway, who are those people?"
"One minute." Eloise turned away and did something with the bar slate.
"That's funny," she said. "They're all from someplace called Tonto. En route to Newpeace. Either of you ever heard of it?"
There was a dull clank as Frank dropped his glass on the floor.
"Oh shit," he said.
Svengali stared at him. "You dropped your drink. Funny, I had you pegged for a man with bottle. You going to tell me what's bugging you, big boy?"
"I've met people from there before." He glanced at the mirror behind the bar, taking in the table, the five clean-cut types playing cards and studiously ignoring him, their quasi-uniform appearance and robust backwoods build.
"Them. Here. Oh shit. I thought the Romanov was only making a refueling stop, but it must be a real port of call."
An elbow prodded him in the ribs; he found Svengali staring up at him, speculation writ large on the off-duty clown's face. "Come on, back to my room. I've got a bottle stashed in my trunk; you can tell me all about it.
Eloise, room party after your shift?"
"I'm off in ten minutes, or whenever Lucid relieves me," she said. Glancing at him, interestedly: "Is it a good story?"
"A story?" Frank echoed. "You could say." He glanced at the table. A flashback to icy terror prickled across his skin, turned his guts to water.
"We'd better leave quietly." The woman, Mathilde, the one in charge, was watching him in one of the gilt-framed mirrors. Her expression wasn't so much unfriendly as disinterested, like a woman trying to make up her mind whether or not to swat a buzzing insect. "Before they really notice us."
"Now?" Svengali hopped down off his stool and got an arm under Frank's shoulder. He'd had rather a lot to drink, but for some reason Svengali seemed almost sober. Frank, for his part, wasn't sober so much as so frightened that it felt like it. He let Svengali lead him through the door, toward a lift cube, then from it down a narrow uncarpeted corridor to a small, cramped crew stateroom. "Come on. Not much farther," said Svengali. "You want that drink?"
"I want—" Frank shivered. 'Yeah," he said. "Preferably somewhere where they don't know it's my room."
"Somewhere." Svengali keyed the door open, waved Frank down at one end of the narrow bunk, and shut the door. He rummaged in one of the overhead lockers and pulled out a metal flask and a pair of collapsible shot glasses. "So how come you know those guys?"
"I'm not sure." Frank grimaced. "But they're from Tonto, and going to Newpeace. I had a really bad time on Newpeace once … "
THE BULLET SEASON
Newpeace, 18 years earlier
Frank and Alice watched the beginnings of the demonstration from the top of the Demosthenes Hotel in downtown Samara. The top of the hotel was a flat synrock expanse carpeted in well-manicured grass, now browning at the edges. The swimming pool and bar in the center of the lawn was drained, water long since diverted for emergency irrigation. In fact, most of the hotel staff had gone—conscripted into the Peace Enforcement Organization, fled to the hills, joined the rebels, who knew what.
It wasn't quite Frank's first field job, but it was close enough that Alice, a tanned, blond, hard-as-nails veteran of many botched campaigns, had taken him under her wing and given him a clear-cut—some would say micromanaged—set of instructions for how to run the shop in her absence.
Then she'd taken off into the heart of darkness in search of the real story, leaving Frank to cool his heels on the roof of the hotel. She'd returned from her latest expedition three days earlier, riding the back of a requisitioned militia truck with a crateful of camera drones and a magic box that took in water at one end and emitted something not entirely unlike cheap beer at the other—as long as the concentrate cans held out. Frank welcomed her back with mixed emotions. On the one hand, her tendency to use him as a gofer rankled slightly; on the other, he was slowly going out of his skull with a mixture of boredom and paranoia, minding the shop on his own and hoping like hell that nothing happened while the boss was away.
To get the hotel roof (right on the edge of City Square, empty and untended in the absence of foreign business travelers and visiting out-of-town politicos) they'd had to pay off the owner, a twitchy-eyelidded off-world entrepreneur called Vadim Trofenko, with untraceable slugs of buttery, high-purity gold. Nothing else would do in these troubled times, it seemed.
Getting hold of the stuff had been a royal pain in the ass, and had entailed Alice going on a week-long trip up to orbit, leaving Frank to mind the bureau all on his lonesome. But at least the agency's money was buying them the penthouse suite, however neglected it was. Most of the other hacks who'd descended like flies on the injured flank of the city of Samara to watch the much-ballyhooed descent into civil war at firsthand had discovered that they could find accommodation for neither love nor money.
Frank had hung in while his boss was away, hammering out hangovers and human-angle commentaries by day, and descending like some kind of pain-feeding vampire from his rooftop every night to walk the streets and talk to people in the cafes and bars and on boulevard corners, soaking up the local color and nodding earnestly at their grievances. Lately he'd taken to hanging out in the square with a recorder, where the students and unemployed gathered to chant their slogans at the uncaring ranks of police and the blank facade of the provincial assembly buildings. He did this long into the night, before staggering back to the big empty hotel bed to crash out. But not this morning.
"I've got a bad feeling, kid," Alice had told him. She stared pensively out at the square. "A really bad feeling. Look to the back door; you wouldn't want to catch your ass in it when they slam it shut. Somebody's going to blink, and when the shit hits the fan … " She gestured at the window, out at the huge poster that covered most of the opposite wall of the square. "It's the tension, mostly. It seems to be slackening. And that's always a bad sign."
Big Bill's avuncular face beamed down, jovial and friendly as anyone's favorite uncle, guarded from the protesters by a squad of riot police, day and night. Despite the sentries, someone had managed to fly a handheld drone into the dead politician's right eye, splashing a red paint spot across his iris in a grisly reminder of what had happened to the last elected President.
"I didn't exactly think things were getting better," Frank equivocated. "But isn't it just political chicken? Same old same old—they'll devalue the dollaro and get a public works program going, someone will go out into the outback and haggle with Commandante Alpha, and things'll begin working again.
Won't they?"
Alice snorted. "You wish. It only seems to be lightening up because the jokers are getting ready to pull something serious."
Up top wasn't much different. "It's gonna burn," said Thelma, a short, deeply tanned woman who was related to one of the public bizintel agencies out around Turku in some obscurely mercenary way, and who'd weaseled her way into Alice's confidence by sharing her stash of fuel cells with her. She was working over one of Alice's tripod-mounted bug launchers when Frank came up onto the roof. The air still held the last of night's chill, but the vast glazed dome of the sky promised another skull baker of a day. "Did you hear about the mess down Cardinal's Way yesterday?"
"Nope. What happened?" Frank held a chipped coffee mug bearing the hotel's crest under the nozzle of Alice's fizzbeer contraption and pushed the button. It gurgled creakily and dribbled a stream of piss-colored fluid, propelled by whatever was left of the hotel's water tankage. The Peace Enforcement had turned off the water supply to the hotels in the business district two days before, officially in case they fell into the hands of subversive elements. In practice, it was a not-so-subtle "Fuck off, we've got business in hand" signal to the warblogger corps.
"Over by the homeless aid center on West Circular Four. Another car bomb.
Anyway, the polis cordoned off the area afterward and arrested everyone.
Thing is, the car that went bang was an unmarked polis car: one they used for disappearances until a resistance camera tagged it a week ago. The only people who got hurt were doalies queuing for their maintenance. I was on my way there to meet Ish—a source—and word is that before it went up, a couple of cops parked it, then walked away."
"Uh-huh." Frank passed her the mug of lukewarm fizzbeer. "Have you had any luck messaging off planet today?"
"Funny you should ask that." It was Alice, arriving on deck without warning.
"Someone's been running all the outgoing imagery I sent via the post office through a steg-scrubber, fuzzing the voxels." She cast Frank a sharp look.
"What makes you ask?"
"Well, I haven't had as much mail as usual … " he trailed off. "How do you know it's being tampered with?" he asked, curiosity winning out.
"How the fuck do you think Eric gets his request messages to me without the Peace Enforcement bugging the call? It's our little back channel." (Eric was their desk editor back home.)
"That makes sense." Frank was silent for a moment. "What's he saying?"
"Time to check our return tickets." Alice gave a tight little smile.
"Will you guys stop talking in code and tell me what you think's going on?"
demanded Thelma.
"The cops are getting ready to break skulls, wholesale," said Alice, pointing at the far side of the square. "They've been piling on the pressure for weeks. Now they're lifting off, to let the protesters think they've got a bit of slack. They'll come out to complain, and the cops get to round them all up.
If that's the right way to describe what's coming."
The situation on Newpeace—or, more accurately, in the provincial capitals of Redstone and Samara and Old Venice Beach—had been deteriorating for about three years, ever since the last elections. Newpeace had been settled by (or, it was more accurate to say, the Eschaton had dumped on the planet) four different groups in dispersed areas—confused Brazilian urbanites from Rio; ferocious, insular, and ill-educated hill villagers from Borneo; yet more confused middle-class urban stay-at-homes from Hamburg, Germany; and the contents of a sleepy little seaside town in California. Each colony had been plonked down in a different corner of the planet's one major continent—a long, narrow, skinny thing the shape of Cuba but nearly six thousand kilometers long—along with a bunch of self-replicating robot colony factories, manuals and design libraries sufficient to build and maintain a roughly late-twentieth-century tech level McCivilization, and a ten-meter-tall diamond slab with the Three Commandments of the Eschaton engraved on it in ruby letters that caught the light of the rising sun.
Leave a planet like that to mature and ferment for three centuries: the result was a vaguely federal system with six major provinces, three languages, a sizable Catholic community, and an equally sizable bunch of Eschaton-worshiping nutbars from the highlands who spent their surplus income building ten-meter-tall cargo cult diamond monoliths. It hadn't been entirely tranquil, but they hadn't fought a major war for nearly two hundred years—until now.
"But isn't most of the resistance out in the hills?" asked Frank. "I mean, they're not going to come down hard in the towns, are they?"
"They've got to do it, and do it soon," Alice said irritably. "Running around the hills is hard work; at least in the city the protesters are easy to find.
That's why I say they're going to do it here, and do it soon. You seen the latest on the general strike?"
"Is it going ahead?" Frank raised an eyebrow.
Thelma spat. "Not if the Peace Enforcement Organization scum get their way."
"Wrong." Alice looked grimly satisfied. "The latest I've got from the Transport Workers' collective, last time I spoke to them—Emilio was clear on it being a negotiating gambit. They don't expect actually to have to play that card: it would hurt them far more than it would hurt the federales. But the feds can act as if it's a genuine threat. The collective are playing into their hands. Watch my lips: there's going to be a crackdown. Ever since Friedrich Gotha bought the election after Wilhelm he's been creaming himself looking for an excuse to fuck the rebels hard. Did you hear about Commandante Alpha being in the area? That'd be a bad sign, you ask me.
I've been trying to arrange an interview but—"
"Commandante Alpha does not exist," a woman's voice called from the staircase. Frank turned and squinted against the rising sun. Whoever she was, she'd come up the service stairs: despite the sun in his eyes he had a vague impression of a slightly plump ice blonde, dressed for knocking around the outback like all the other journalists and war whores thronging the city and waiting for the storm to break. Something about her nagged at him for a moment before he realized what it was; her bush jacket and trousers looked as if they'd been laundered less than five minutes earlier.
They were crisp, video anchor crisp, militarily precise. Whoever's paying for the live video bandwidth better have deep pockets, he thought vaguely as she continued. "He's a psywar fabrication. Doesn't exist, you see. He's just a totem designed to inspire support and loyalty to the resistance movement among confused villagers."
"Does it make any difference?" asked Alice. She was busy unpacking another drone as she talked. "I mean, the thing about a mass movement is, once it gets going it's hard to stop it. Even if you take down a charismatic leader, as long as the roots of the grievance remain, another fucking stupid hero will come along and pick up the flag. Leaders generate themselves.