Authors: Gavin Smith
They had the thinnest, frailest bodies I’d yet seen on Lalande. They made Strange look bulky. I think had they not been supported by complex-looking exo-frames, their bodies would have just snapped in the high gravity. They hung completely limp in their frames, held up by what looked like thick metal tendrils. Hanging there, they reminded me of Sharcroft in his spider chair, all but a corpse.
They wore dresses that looked like they had once been expensive and fashionable but had seen better days a long time ago. They were accessorised with tatty, once-elegant, elbow-length gloves. Crying facemasks of beaten steel covered their faces.
I didn’t get this. How could this mockery rule the Rookery’s criminal classes? By criminal classes, I meant everyone in the Rookery. They were poor; it wasn’t like they had a choice.
‘You’re bringing trouble to our door, Tailgunner,’ they said. Each word seemed to come from a different one of them. There was no hesitation. The accusation flowed like a proper sentence but somehow it sounded like a ripple of words. I didn’t like it. I kept wanting to turn around, but every time I did I found Soloso there. He was always watching one of us. Most often Tailgunner, but as soon as I looked behind me he would turn his huge dreadlock-shrouded, bullet-shaped head to look at me and smile.
‘Yeah, that’s probably true,’ Tailgunner said after some thought.
‘We have money,’ I said distractedly. I was still looking behind me at Soloso. I turned around to face the Puppet Show.
‘Which we could relieve you of,’ the Puppet Show said. It was very matter of fact, almost as if it wasn’t paying attention.
‘We need supplies,’ Tailgunner told it. He glanced at me. ‘We’ll make it worth your while.’
‘What sort of supplies and for how much?’ the three of them asked as one.
‘Food and medicine mainly, maybe some tools and later some ammunition and explosives. For a lot of people. We’ll take what you can give us.’
The working-class Scottish part of me thought he was being very cavalier with someone else’s money. On the other hand we were being pretty cavalier with Sharcroft’s money. The Puppet Show took some time looking between us.
‘This looks like black ops kind of trouble to us. Why would we want that?’ they asked in unison.
‘Again, money,’ I suggested.
They all turned to look at me. They moved in a kind of angry jerking way, exactly like puppets on a string.
‘We have lots of money. We don’t need trouble from the Freedom Squads. See, a very nice young lady came and explained it to us. Perhaps you know her?’
I manage to resist the urge to look around to see if she was standing in the shadows. Like I’d see her if she was. Morag glanced over at me, worried.
‘See, we can do what we want as long as we don’t interfere with them in any way. It seems like a good deal,’ the Puppet Show continued.
‘Before we talk any more, are we safe here?’ Merle asked, his tone neutral.
‘You are what we say you are here. Nothing more,’ the Puppet Show answered.
This was starting to freak me out. I wondered if they were just three corpses in a frame used as a front to mess with people. Was Soloso the real boss?
‘Which doesn’t answer my fucking question.’
‘Look, this is a nice set-up you have here. Sure it impresses the locals, but if you’re going to fuck us, let’s get to shooting. You go first. If not then I’m going to assume that you’re stalling, which means you’ve got people on the way, which means we’ll initiate the shooting,’ Cat surprised me by saying.
The four of us that weren’t Tailgunner shifted slightly, ready to go for guns. Soloso didn’t even flinch. I know because I glanced nervously behind me.
‘Tailgunner.’ It was a whisper, one syllable each, but they still made it sound like a complete word.
‘Okay, everyone just cool down,’ Tailgunner said, making placatory gestures with his hands.
‘We’re not the people for your street-level bullshit,’ Merle said, sounding genuinely angry.
‘That’s enough. We’re in their house,’ I said to Merle. He didn’t answer. I turned to the Puppet Show. ‘You’re very scary. Seriously, I don’t like this at all. It’s creepy.’ I ignored the look of contempt from Merle and the look of confusion from Morag. ‘We’re here to deal. If you don’t want to, then we’ll go our separate ways and you do what you have to do. Even if that means grassing us up. If you want to deal then let’s get all the gun-pointing, cock-waving, I’m-harder-than-thee bollocks out of the way so we can get on with business.’
‘We didn’t come here to fight you,’ Morag added. ‘But just so you know, we could be a lot of trouble for anyone who helps us.’ Now she didn’t have to emphasise that, but it was now most definitely all our cards on the table.
The Puppet Show stared at us. They stared at us for a very long time. They were very good at intimidation psychology for three inanimate bodies dangling from a roof. I could see Merle getting impatient. I was trying to decide whether or not to target Soloso or one of the automated weapon systems in the rafters. The rafters were winning but I reckoned I’d let the shoulder laser have a crack at Soloso. Though I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’d be like trying to kill a tank with a flashlight. Then I remembered that my combat jacket didn’t have a shoulder flap for the laser anyway.
‘You are safe here,’ came the rippling answer, finally. Tailgunner, Cat and I relaxed slightly.
‘I don’t wish to appear disrespectful but how does that work?’ Morag asked. As she did the Puppet Show jerked round to face her. Not so long ago she would have flinched. Not now though. ‘You’re networked, aren’t you? This whole place.’
‘It works by having to shut down our entire system and go on to a clean life support while every single component is stripped out and replaced and then shielded at some expense. It works through isolation from the net that was our world. It works through surgery to cut our infected systems to replace them with new clean ones. It works through constant and expensive vigilance to keep out attempts to invade our system or re-link it to the net.’
It was difficult to tell, but I reckoned two, if not all of them were pretty pissed off about Demiurge. Morag looked at me and shrugged. It wasn’t the definitive all-clear I was hoping for on the communications security side of things, but at least it wasn’t her screaming at us to run.
‘You’ll deal with us then?’ I asked.
‘Not at the expense of our own destruction,’ the three voices answered. ‘But we will listen and we have no interest in turning you in. How many people do you need supplies for?’
There was a pause. Years of training meant that we did not wish to give away any more info than we had to.
‘Just over two hundred,’ Morag said. She hadn’t had the training. She looked at me and shrugged. I guess we had to trust it or we’d never get anywhere. Merle didn’t look happy but then he never did. I found that I really didn’t care if he was happy or not.
The Puppet Show swayed from side to side in what I guessed was a negative gesture.
‘Too many,’ they said. ‘We have the supplies but we cannot get them to you without being noticed. We can get small bits and pieces; maybe we can provide you with a couple of protein mulch vats, but anything beyond that is too dangerous.’
‘Another waste of time,’ Merle said. ‘Shame. I’d heard good things about you.’
‘That’s enough,’ Tailgunner told him.
I wasn’t paying attention. I was having an idea.
‘This is the big supply nexus for the region, right?’ I asked. Tailgunner nodded. ‘Does that include the Citadel?’
‘Yeah,’ Tailgunner answered. ‘But it’s a no go. The supplies are delivered by Mag Lev. The tunnels are embedded in the rock and the stations are fortresses.’
‘If you had enough firepower or explosives could you take out one of their tunnels?’ I asked.
Fortunately Tailgunner picked up on what I was talking about. ‘I think we could probably find some place weak enough,’ he said.
‘So what?’ Cat asked. ‘Rolleston and his friends don’t get their supplies immediately but neither do we.’
‘What are their alternative methods for supply delivery?’ Merle asked, catching on. ‘Shuttle?’
‘Not between here and there. The Citadel was chosen because it was difficult to get to. If They were to attack They would have to bottleneck through tunnels. That meant They couldn’t bring in some of their really big guns like the Hydras,’ the Puppet Show told us. ‘They have a dedicated Mag Lev link. If they can’t do that then they will have to do it the old-fashioned way by ground convoy.’
I brought up a map of the area on my internal system. Along with the catapult, there was another atmosphere processor and a military shuttle port above us. It was the shuttle port that kept people alive during the various sieges, as it was the entrepôt for supplies delivered from orbit and other parts of Lalande 2.
With Moa City being turned into what was effectively a fortress, they wanted to have their vital supplies like food and munitions as well protected as possible. The centre of the city had been converted into a supply depot and had grown and grown. Which meant that if the Mag Lev was down …
‘Any supply convoy would have to come by here,’ I mused.
‘Which still doesn’t help you,’ the Puppet Show said. ‘Because you’re still left with the same problem of having to get it out of the city without being spotted. It’s near-total surveillance.’
‘But you know how to do it,’ Morag said.
‘Not without getting noticed.’
‘So let them notice. Because they’ll think it’s us. Which it will be, just with a little bit of local help,’ Morag added.
The Puppet Show was quiet. We waited. We waited some more. I thought about listening to some Billie Holiday on my internal systems.
‘We want to see a full plan, including how you’re going to minimise our exposure, and we will want a ridiculous amount of money for as little aid as we can get away with providing. Half of it now.’
‘That seems unreasonable,’ I said equitably.
Soloso was by my side holding an old-fashioned black credit chip that still had a digital readout on it. The display showed a ludicrous sum.
‘That’s just half, isn’t it?’ I asked.
He nodded. Reluctantly I took one of the black credit chips we had with us out of the pocket of my combat jacket. I had to struggle with my nature to pay so much for so little, particularly having had no money for the majority of my life. Then I remembered it wasn’t my money; it was Sharcroft’s and he was a prick. I gave them a bonus.
Morag held up a memory chip. ‘This is the truth as best we can tell it. What happened on Earth, the war, who Rolleston and Cronin are and what they’ve done, and what we think is going on here and in the other colonies. Read and watch it. We’ve provided what corroborating evidence we could but that’ll be difficult to check under Demiurge. If you’re prepared to believe it then pass it on.’
Again the Puppet Show was quiet for a while before answering.
‘We will review it. If we believe it we will have it disseminated by people several steps removed from us. Perhaps we will do so even if we don’t believe it. We understand the value of propaganda,’ the Puppet Show finally replied.
Morag looked pained. ‘We worked long and hard to make sure it wasn’t propaganda. It’s always going to be subjective but we’ve tried to tell the truth as best we can.’
The Puppet Show disappeared up into the rafters as if they had been yanked up. The curtains closed. Bit rude, I thought. Soloso was standing by Morag. He towered over her. Again not so long ago she would have been intimidated, but not now. She just handed him the memory chip.
‘We’re done here? Let me see you to your cable,’ Soloso said with all the politeness of a posh hotel concierge, if the concierge was capable of pulling your legs off and eating your head.
The general rule in the army is never volunteer. I’d learned this the hard way after I’d joined 5 Para, or rather after I’d volunteered to join instead of waiting for the inevitable draft. It was so I could join the same regiment that hadn’t managed to kill my mum and dad. I’d had some odd ideas in my teens. I’d volunteered for this too. I wanted to see the show. I was quite surprised when Morag joined me.
That was why I was dangling from high-tensile rope over a six-hundred-foot drop in a vertical water-drill-cut shaft pretending to be a combat engineer and desperately trying to remember my demolitions training. I was also trying to teach Morag how to place demo. I had no idea where I stood with her so of course I chose this moment to talk to her about what I can only laughingly call our relationship. The status of which I had come to think of as good if I wasn’t being shot at. I was so bad at this sort of thing.
‘There’s no need to be gentle. It’s pretty safe until it’s got a detonator in it,’ I told her as we worked plastic concentrate explosive into what we hoped were likely fracture points. The
whanau
all had experience of mining but they were busy at the moment. Some of the others back at
Utu Pa
probably could have helped but we hadn’t thought to ask. Morag followed my lead and worked the charge into the crack with a look of concentration on her face.
‘You did well with the Puppet Show the other day,’ I said. She grunted a vague affirmative. ‘And in the FAV.’