Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIX
We believe all human life on Aquilo to be equal regardless of employment status.
We exist to unite, support, and empower all unwaged individuals against Company-sanctioned discrimination and persecution.
We seek to dismantle systems of economic oppression.
We aim to organize ourselves as revolutionaries and will take direct action to bring about the world we envision, a world in which all people are badgeless.
—mission statement of United Freelancers
Every employee has the right to a safe and secure workplace. Any threat or risk of violence will be investigated and treated with the utmost seriousness.
—Starhome Exploration Group, colonial policy
Terrasday, 6-week, 500 AF
Isako’s back in the Old Warehouse, standing in front of Waterboy and his two minders from United Freelancers, the stringy-haired man in overalls whose name she’s learned is Laurent and the feisty woman with the bandana named Selene.
She doesn’t know their kith names. No one gives their kith names in here.
Waterboy’s little congregation has grown over the past week.
Now there are two dozen badgeless hanging around at the back of the cavernous building, where it’s warmest and safest. Some loiter out of curiosity or boredom, but some, no doubt, are motivated true believers, hungry for the passionate if disjointed ramblings of the wageman who beat the system.
Who miraculously escaped the death sentence other freels know to be their own eventuality.
The sole survivor of Field 93 is a hero, activist, philosopher, and maybe a bit of a madman.
Laurent and Selene seem increasingly aware that they have something useful and possibly dangerous on their hands with Waterboy. Isako’s not sure whether to think of them as Waterboy’s henchmen, hosts, or babysitters. Or a combination of all of the above.
“Have you considered what I said about working together?” she asks.
Waterboy swivels in his pulpit-like office chair, swaying his head back and forth and smirking knowingly. “So you can get us to run all the risks, then turn around and pin us with the blame?”
Laurent sniffs in agreement. “Exactly. Tracs are tools. Their only loyalty is to the jarbrains and they don’t do shit for anyone unless it’s client ordered.” He lifts his upper lip at Isako. “How can we trust anything that comes out of your mouth?”
“Who said anything about trust? I’m only talking about a partnership of convenience based on shared objectives.”
“And what objectives are those?” Selene demands.
“I told you before,” Isako says with more patience than she feels, “my client considers Sandbar Uchi an enemy and a threat. You came awfully close to blowing him up in his car last year. The bombers claimed they worked alone, but the explosives came from somewhere. From United Freelancers. We’re natural allies. ”
Selene turns to the nearby hangers-on who’re listening in. “Everyone get the fuck out of here, now,” she orders. “Bunch of nosy good-for-nothing detrits.”
Once the audience has reluctantly dispersed, Laurent shoves a folding screen over the opening of Waterboy’s personal space to prevent anyone from coming in or hearing the conversation.
“So.” Waterboy’s wide grin is unsettling. “You want us to try to kill the bastard again.”
“No. I’m going to kill Sandbar Uchi myself.”
That surprises them, although it shouldn’t. She’s not about to pin the vital outcome of her final contract on the questionable competency of vigilantes who fucked it up before.
Laurent gawps at her. “You’ve lost your whole damn mind.”
“Possibly.” She lets herself smile.
“Where’s your buddy?” Selene asks. “The big fucker they call Strikebreaker?”
“He’s out,” Isako says. “It’s just me now.”
“Just you.” Laurent chuckles. “SoCon GasPro is practically a fortress. When Uchi makes a public appearance, it’s with a whole security team. He even has a real looker of a jarbrain bodyguard that they say is the fastest trac in the Company with the longknife.”
The smile drops off Isako’s face. “Is that so.”
They think that little redheaded jarbrain bitch is the new Quickblade?
Laurent adds, “It was hard enough to get close to him last year, and he’s more careful now. And he’s a jarbrain. We had a better chance when he was still made of meat.”
“That’s why it’s got to be done precisely and from up close.”
Waterboy stares at her intently. “Have you ever killed a jarbrain before?”
She hasn’t. She’s brought about more death than she cares to think about, but she hasn’t ever killed a second stager.
Such a thing almost never happens. The Company elite are always jockeying for position and trying to undermine their rivals, but they tend to be professionals about it.
Outright murder is uncommon. It’s blunt, difficult, and almost always unnecessary.
When it does happen, it’s work for shadowcons.
That’s what you are now.
“I’ve never killed a jarbrain,” she admits, “but I’ve been around them enough to know how.”
The synthetic braincase is well reinforced, but polymer tubes run down the back of the neck to interior oxygen filtration chambers.
Severing those would starve the brain of air and be nearly as good as cutting someone’s throat.
She neglects to mention that the odds of getting close enough to be that exact with the longknife are stacked heavily against her.
The freelancers are eyeing her the way they would an unmarked package dropped at their front door. Could be a basket of cookies. Could be anthrax. “Well, this just got very interesting.” Waterboy rubs his hands together as if either outcome would be fun. “What’s your plan?”
“Like you said, trying to get to Uchi in SoCon GasPro headquarters would be nearly impossible. But he entered second stage recently and has to undergo routine postoperative evaluations at the synthtech clinic where he was recorporalized. I know the place, date, and time of his next appointment. I can get inside and get to Uchi while he’s there. All I need from you is a distraction.”
“What sort of distraction?” Selene sounds cautiously enthusiastic now.
“You have more explosives. Illegal homemade stuff.” She takes their silence as an affirmative.
“A few of them going off near the clinic while Uchi is inside will cause the facility to go into lockdown protocol. As long as I’m already in, Uchi will be trapped in there with me.
His security team will fan out to protect the building, which’ll make it easier for me to get to him. ”
Selene and Laurent exchange glances. Then they both look to Waterboy.
He might be a raving whackjob, but the sole survivor of Field 93 carries weight around here now.
He could be the spark over kerosene, the figurehead UF needs to go from being a bunch of badgeless malcontents to a real problem for the Company.
Isako wonders if she’s just lit the match.
“You know, I think it’s just so fucking beautiful how the universe, the gods of old Earth, the Mother in Chains below, whatever name you give the powers that be”—Waterboy raises his eyes and both his index fingers reverently to the ceiling—“have a way of delivering justice in mysterious ways using the most unexpected of instruments. You’re not the first trac that’s surprised me.
Who am I to question the signposts of my calling? ”
Waterboy leaps to his feet and spreads his arms wide overhead as if cheering a championship-winning futsal point, the bulky sleeves of his industrial green parka bunching around his narrow shoulders. “We should give her one,” he announces.
Laurent shifts uneasily. “You sure about that?”
“We should give her one,” Waterboy repeats with the conviction of a prophet.
Selene goes out of the room and returns a minute later with a package wrapped in cloth. Isako doesn’t have to touch it or unwrap it to see the shape and know what it is.
She looks Selene in the eye. “How many guns do you have?”
“Only a few.” A few is already a death sentence for her and Laurent and everyone in the Old Warehouse suspected of conspiring with them.
Most people view the badgeless with pity.
With guns, however, they’re a nascent army, and anything that evokes the horrible specter of the Prosperity Revolt is something the Company cannot tolerate.
Isako’s surprised they’re trusting her with their most dangerous and valuable contraband. But as she pointed out earlier, trust isn’t part of the equation. This is about mutual interest. Or rather, mutual enmity.
Selene undoes the cloth wrapping. “It doesn’t have much range—about a hundred meters or so.
Someone on our side smuggled out a Founding-era museum piece, took it apart, scanned it, and sold the specs to us.
We print the parts separately and put it together ourselves, so we don’t ring any alarm bells. It works, though.”
The gun is a blocky thing, but not large. The only other guns Isako’s glimpsed up close are the sleek, heavy metal weapons carried by Marsh Elias. This object looks nothing like those. More like a plastic toy than a real firearm.
“Have you ever fired a gun before? It holds two bullets, and you chamber it like this.” Selene shows her how to work the thing, her actions confident but slow, the sign of a person who has practiced a skill at length but never actually used it.
Isako takes the gun. She shouldn’t. It goes against her principles as a longkniveswoman.
She doesn’t know how to properly use a gun, and having taught longknife skills to many trainees, she knows that trying to use a weapon you’re piss-poor at is more dangerous than not having a weapon at all.
She doesn’t even trust that the amateurishly manufactured thing will work when she needs it to.
But she’s curious. She’s never held a gun before.
It fits neatly into her hand. She replicates Selene’s motions, finds the mechanism simple enough. A lot simpler than the precision quick draw of the longknife. Her palm tingles with the sense of power and the taint of corruption.
She turns to Waterboy. “Why are you giving this to me?”
The man’s sunset-blue eyes dance with the fiendish curiosity of someone who’s handed a power saw to a child.
“You’ll put it to good use, won’t you? Like you said, it’s hard to kill a jarbrain.
If you can’t get close enough to take his head off, you can still shoot him between the eyes.
” He squints, makes a pistol shape out of his thumb and forefinger, and mimes the pulling of the trigger and the kickback of the shot. “Pew!”
Perhaps this is a test. Who knows how Waterboy’s scattered mind works.
If she rejects his gift, maybe he’ll see it as another of his signs, an indication she’s not committed to her goal or a premonition that she’ll betray them.
For her plan to succeed, she needs these freels to do their part.
She can’t afford for there to be doubt between them.
Besides, if she takes the gun, that’s one less weapon in the possession of United Freelancers. Working with them doesn’t mean she wants another Prosperity Revolt.
Then there’s simple pragmatism. Waterboy is right—she might not get anywhere near enough to Uchi to kill him.
She not afraid of any other longkniveswoman, but she has to admit it’s not going to be easy to get through a second-stage bodyguard who doesn’t feel fatigue or pain, who can’t bleed out, who could lose an arm and keep going.
It would be sacrilege for Quickblade to resort to an illegal firearm for her last contract instead of the trusted Suzimachi L10 she learned at the knee of her kithfather.
But synthbodies aren’t exactly fair advantages either.
An ace up the sleeve might mean the difference between success and failure.
Isako wraps the gun back in the cloth and tucks it into the inside pocket of her red coat. Its small, hard-edged shape against her body feels ten times heavier than the longknife.
“Next Terrasday, six twenty, at the Elite Renewal synthtech clinic,” she tells them. “I’ll be inside and waiting. Create a scare but don’t do anything extreme—no innocent-bystander deaths, got it?” The last thing she needs is more blood on her hands.
“We can handle it,” Selene promises. She meets Isako’s eyes, as if searching warily for a connection that’s not there.
Her voice takes a slow, reluctant turn and loses some of its usual orneriness.
“I was once a black badge, too. A midtrac. Worked six years for the same client before being hired on for good. The next year, my boss was implicated in an embezzlement scandal and someone had to take the fall. My daughter was two years old.”
Isako thinks of the girl with the braids, running through the shantytown.
“Given the chance, I didn’t do the respectable thing.
You don’t realize until you’ve crossed it that the line between who you think you are on one day and who you could be the next is awfully fucking thin.
” Selene glances meaningfully at where Isako’s hidden away the gun.
“I didn’t think I’d ever be wishing good luck to someone like you. ”
“Guess we’re all surprising ourselves lately.” Isako turns to go.
Waterboy bounces forward, holds an arm out in front of her before she leaves. “Can you hear that?” He cocks his head. “Isn’t it a lovely sound?”
Isako doesn’t hear anything other than the noises of the Old Warehouse, this way station on desperation road that’s all some badgeless have to call home.
Voices raised in barter, chronic coughing, heavy things being moved on concrete, the rhythmic thud of a ball being kicked against a wall, the laborious hum of generators and portable heaters.
“That’s the sound of the glass jar cracking.” Waterboy’s smile spreads like frost on glass. He drops his arm and waves her out dramatically. “What’s the view like from outside, do you think?”