Like a Boss Read online

  Like a Boss

  Adam Rakunas

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  The Good Stuff At The End

  What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist – the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.

  – Rose Schneiderman, at the 1912 Lawrence textile strike

  ONE

  I was sitting at my usual spot at Big Lily’s when I got a call. The words THE REAL JOB floated in front of my eyes, and I groaned. That this happened on my one day off from the water works meant one thing: something had gone wrong at the Old Windswept Distillery. My distillery. I took the call. “What’s up?”

  “Bearings,” said Marolo, my foreman.

  I took a sip of heavy mint. “Well, I’m looking out toward the lifter, so I guess it’s due west.”

  “Ha. And ha,” said Marolo. “You know which ones I mean.”

  “I wish I didn’t.” I got up from my stool and wandered to the lanai. The summer sun sat high in the sky, baking all of Brushhead. The rooftops gleamed, all the photovoltaic paint soaking up photons and sending electricity into bakeries, forges, machinist shops, recording studios, and all the other tiny businesses that kept the neighborhood chugging along. The city’s gentle hills rolled down to the ocean, and I ticked off the names of the other Wards: Chavoen, Faoshue, Beukes Point. The sun was too high to reflect off the ocean, but in a few hours the water would turn into liquid gold. It was a gorgeous sight, but it was nothing compared to the smells.

  The afternoon scents of Santee City swept up from the ocean: goat curry and pineapple empanadas and boiling sugar from the six hundred distilleries that dotted the city below. I took in a snootful of air as the wind wafted over the buildings. There were plenty of bad bits: heated rust, acetone from an etching shop, the unique odor of baking fermented garbage. But every time the breeze shifted, it picked up something new and wonderful: the linseed varnish from Lu Nguyen’s violin shop, sweat from America Matisse’s dojo on Leaping Frog Street, the smell of crushed cane from a hundred backyard presses. All of it swirled in the salt air, making that heady mix that knocked the first colonists off their feet and gave them second thoughts about remaining a part of the Body Corporate. Windswept, the lot of us.

  I should have been enjoying this, but, no, THE REAL JOB now had my undivided attention. “Didn’t we just clean the press last week?”

  “Indeed we did, and now we’ll have to do it again.”

  “Then get to doing.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  I sipped my tea. “I seem to recall paying you an exorbitant sum so I didn’t have to worry about complications.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  I sighed. “What exactly is the problem, Marolo?”

  “I think it’s best for you to come out here and see it.”

  “Jesus, really? This is the first night in months I get to enjoy my cushy life as a distiller! I was going to get dinner, go to Novice Theater to see this monologist perform, pick up strange and exotic men–”

  He laughed. “Since when do you go to monologues?”

  “Where else do you think I find the strange and exotic men?”

  The sound in my head turned to rattling. Marolo must have been shifting the old hard line phone from one ear to the other. Oh, my kingdom for a planet full of paied-up people, just to make the business calls go faster. “I am sorry to call you, Padma, but I really think it would be a good idea to come down tonight. Especially if you want this batch to get pressed on time.”

  That got my attention. “We’re ahead of schedule.”

  “We are now. But we won’t be for long.”

  A prickle of ice scritched across the back of my brain. Anything that got in the way of production of Old Windswept Rum was enough to let The Fear stir inside my head. I took a breath and tamped it back. Not today, asshole. “Why not?”

  “Come and see.”

  “What, it’s too late in the day to use your words?”

  He sighed. “Look, this is one of those things that’s above my pay grade. You’re the owner.”

  Arg. You’re the owner was the time-honored euphemism for your employees are pissed. Of course Marolo couldn’t talk over the phone, not when the people who worked for me were gathered around, listening to his end of the conversation. Or both ends. That was the thing with hard lines; they could be easily spliced. With a pai call, no one could listen in unless they were great at decryption, breaking the law, or both.

  I blinked up the time: three forty-six in the afternoon. The distillery was too far for a bike ride, but I could catch the Red Bus in twenty minutes and still make it there and back in time for Six O’Clock. “Okay. I’ll catch the next bus and be there in an hour. Can you hold everything together that long?”

  Marolo chuckled. “That I can manage.”

  I killed the call. So, there was a crisis important enough for me to haul off to the far northern edge of Santee City, but not so important that I could take the time to use public transportation. What the hell was going on?

  Whatever it is, you’ll probably make it worse, hissed The Fear.

  I took one more hit of the afternoon air, deep enough to banish The Fear to its hidey hole in the back of my brain, and returned to the bar. Big Lily had just set down a plate of steaming kumara cakes, which she picked back up when she saw the look on my face. “I’ll pack these to go.” She got a tiffin-box from under the bar and upended the plate.

  “Thanks.” I drained my mug. “This is not how today was supposed to work.”

  “Trouble down at the mill?”

  I snatched one of the cakes out of the tiffin-box before she could close it. It singed my fingers, which meant it was at the right temperature. “I’m not so naive to think that life was going to be peaches and curry after I retired, but it would be nice if I could just enjoy owning the distillery, you know?”

  Big Lily gave me a raised eyebrow. “You have a funny definition of ‘retired.’”

  I split the kumara cake in two, and its sweet purple insides dribbled onto the bartop. I scooped them up and popped them in my mouth. Heaven. “At least I’m not sitting around listening to people complain about their jobs all day.”

  “I fail to see how cleaning the mains counts as not working.”

  I contemplated another kumara cake. I went for it. “Until I can convince someone to give me a giant pile of money or a better gig, cleaning the mains is all I can do.”

  She shook her head. “I still think you should have fought that judgment. Leaving you on the hook for the lifter reconstruction was wrong.”

  “I couldn’t afford to fight,” I said. “That, and most of the lawyers in town didn’t want to do business with the woman who blew up the lifter.”

  “What about the donations?”

  “Poured them all into the distillery,” I said. “I needed th
e funds to keep the place running.”

  “You know, you could always sell out.”

  I put a hand on my chest. “What? And give up my sole source of economic empowerment?”

  “Then you could leverage that place, scale up production, be the biggest rum producer on Santee.”

  I sighed. “And if I thought it would make a dent in my debt, I would. But it can’t, so I won’t.” That, and the fact that I needed the Old Windswept Rum Distillery to be run exactly as it was.

  But I couldn’t tell that to Big Lily. Or anyone.

  Big Lily snapped the lid on the tiffin-box. “Just think about it, okay? I’d hate to see you spend the rest of your life slaving away in Bloombeck’s old Slot. Getting out of that job is worth another appeal.”

  “Thanks.” I blinked in payment for my tab. Big Lily didn’t try to rebuff me, though it would have been nice if she had. A night on the town wouldn’t have sunk me too much, but I could feel the pressure of bills piling up, payroll especially. Today’s issue would probably demand a little more of that cash.

  I stepped out onto Mercer Boulevard. The place felt dead, but I knew every bistro, bar, and bouncehouse was gearing up for the evening crowd. Tuk-tuk drivers hunched in the front seats of their rides, slurping noodles and trading gossip. The smells of onions, ginger, and lime drifted out of Aunty Gee’s Grill, and the plumeria at the corner laundry house gave one last burst of scent in the warm afternoon light. In three hours, this place would be packed with people reuniting after their shifts, looking to see their children, their lovers, their debtors. My neighborhood would jump back to life, and I would be counting down the minutes until Six O’Clock.

  Oh, Six O’Clock. Quitting time for some people, the start of a shift for others, and the only thing that had kept my brain from falling apart for the past fourteen years. I had lost track of how many meetings, riots, and dinner dates I had had to cancel in order to make Six O’Clock. Most of my friends just accepted it, though a few made a point of mocking me, saying I was leading a double life as a crime-fighter and/or Ghost Agent for the Big Three. I wondered how disappointed they would be if they found out what I really did at Six O’Clock: I sat down and sipped a finger of Old Windswept Single Batch Rum.

  Of course, it wasn’t just about the rum. Fourteen years ago, I was a bright-eyed member of the Body Corporate, ready to join the WalWa drones in Colonial Management. The lengthy transit to Santee Anchorage in a semi-comatose state had screwed up my brain functions in a way that gave birth to waking nightmares and that nasty, brain-sapping mental monster I called The Fear. When I had had enough and Breached, Doctor Ropata was the first person I talked to. Non-Corporates didn’t have access to the vast array of pharmaceutical solutions that were available to everyone in Thronehill, so he made do with a local solution: Old Windswept. The rum had some mild psychoactives that, when combined with the ritual he designed, helped kickstart my stalled-out prefrontal cortex. I had to draw the blinds closed, light a candle, and picture the vastness of the universe and my little place in it.

  Whether he was speaking from experience or bullshit, it didn’t matter. The ritual (and the rum) worked, keeping my brain functioning and The Fear at bay. I had to admit it worked even better now that I owned the Old Windswept Distillery and didn’t have to worry about the supply of rum running out.

  Of course, it would have been nice to figure out just why that transit had damaged my brain, whether it was the hibernant the techs had poured into my sleeping bag or the length of the trip or, hell, even the bag itself. It also would have been nice if it rained almond bialys instead of water. I had long learned to accept that Old Windswept was the way to remain a functioning (and occasionally happy) human being. Granted, if I ever met the WalWa Travel Comfort Systems scientists who designed and built the outfit I’d used, I probably wouldn’t hesitate to punch them in the neck.

  I popped open the tiffin-box and took a bite of a kumara cake. It was crisp on the outside and molten gooey goodness on the inside. Every bite was a wonder, and I laughed at the thought of where I’d be if I hadn’t walked out of that WalWa office fourteen years ago. All that triple-scrubbed air inside the Colonial Management Complex at Thronehill would never smell as good as this, not even on Employee Appreciation Day when Human Resources would pump artificial flavored spearmint and mild stimulants into the HVAC system. Even on my worst, lowest day, when I was cleaning out the worst, lowest intakes in the water treatment plant, I knew I would never return to that life. Nothing could drag me back. Not after everything I’d built and bought and outright stolen.

  I rounded the corner onto Beda Street, where the Red Line bus stop squatted between a strip club and a library. The bus system had started a year ago. A few Breaches had come shimmying down the cable in a loaded cargo can, hiding among the flatpacked buses. Rather than give the parts back, the Union confiscated and built them out. Hacking the control software turned out to be a pain, leading to the occasional bus stopping dead in its tracks. Still, it meant more people could get to and from the kampong, and it was cheaper for me than hiring a tuk-tuk, even though Jilly’s company still cut me the Friends And Family rate.

  The Red Line went all the way from Brushhead to Tanque, the Ward on the far edge of town where the late Estella Tonggow had set up the Old Windswept Distillery. She had been able to cruise there and back in an armored limousine. I had to settle for the bus. Though, as I approached the stop, I might not have been able to settle even for that.

  The stop was little more than a caneplas box surrounding a pair of benches. Three sunburned people in ragged clothes snoozed on the benches, their bags at their feet. A scrawled sign glued to the side of the shelter said NO SERVICE TODAY DUE TO. The rest of the sign had been torn away, and the greasy fingerprints on the paper left the reasons to my imagination. I blinked up the Public and saw no notices about a system stoppage. “Excuse me,” I said to the people, “what’s up with the bus?”

  One of them, a woman with a massive salt-and-pepper plait, opened her eyes and said, “What? You never ride a bus before?”

  I took a step back. Her eyes were hard and cold, like a shark on the hunt. I peeled the sign off the shelter and held it up. “I don’t think any of us are taking this bus.”

  She squinted at the sign and groaned. “Aw, spit. That must have happened after we got here.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  Now she squinted at me. “What’s it to you?”

  I gave her a side-eyed look. Not everyone in Santee City was a friendly, happy, we’re-all-in-it-together type. But this fast pivot toward aggression felt off. She didn’t look or smell drunk, but I felt my guts shrivel the way they always did before Last Call. I held up my hands and gave her a gentle smile with no teeth. “Just wondering. I need this bus to get to work.”

  She dialed back the squint a little. “Yeah. Us, too.” She nudged the other two people awake. “Hey. Our ride’s not coming.”

  “Fuggoff,” said one of them, a man whose face was more beard than skin.

  The woman with the plait walloped him upside the head. “Don’t talk to me that way, jackass.”

  The third, another woman whose hair was short and slicked back, shoved both of them. “All of you shut up. I’m tryna sleep before our ride gets here.”

  “It’s not coming,” said Plait Woman. I blinked her face into the Public so I could get her name, but she didn’t register. None of them did. That was weird as hell. They all had Union fists under their old Indenture tattoos. These people didn’t just fall out of orbit into the middle of Brushhead.

  “It will,” said Short And Slicked. “Just wait.”

  “We’ve been waiting all day,” said Beard Face.

  “Then you can wait some more. Shut it.”

  “But they said we were gonna start working this morning ’cause they had a deadline–”

  The look that Short And Slicked threw at Beard Face was so sharp that I felt it. He shut up and looked at the ragged bag at his feet. I gl
anced at it and saw the seven-pointed star stenciled on its surface. I looked behind the bus shelter; squeezed between the library and the strip joint was a police sub-station, closed for the day. All of it clicked together: the star was the symbol for Maersk Island, Santee Anchorage’s prison. The substation was closed because releases are filed in the morning. These three hadn’t been able to summon a tuk-tuk because their pais had restricted access. I couldn’t blink up their profiles on the Public because they hadn’t earned them back. They were parolees.

  “I heard nothing,” I said.

  “There was nothing to hear,” she said. “We’re just waiting for a ride.”

  “You want me to call you one?” I said.

  She waved me off. “We got it covered.”

  I nodded. Eighteen months ago, finding them housing and jobs and counseling would have been my concern. It didn’t happen often during my time as Ward Chair, but it was always tough. Parolees were kept on short leashes until enough people began to vouch for their behavior, and that meant sticking them in the worst of the non-Slot jobs. People got sent to Maersk for crimes against other people: assault, rape, murder. I’ve been all over this planet, but I’ve never had reason to visit Maersk. Not even when Evanrute Saarien was sent there.

  I clenched my jaw. I hadn’t given Saarien a moment’s thought until now. He’d been a Ward Chair from Sou’s Reach, home of the first cane refinery in the city. While some people would have seen that as an opportunity to be a good steward to a historic facility, Saarien turned it into the base for destroying the entire trans-stellar economy. He blew smoke up the Executive Committee’s ass, telling them he was using his Ward’s maintenance funds to build a community of artisans to boost the local economy. They were so taken with the weavers and glassblowers, they failed to notice him building an underground refinery to grow and process new strains of sugarcane that would have poisoned all the cane in Occupied Space. If he had succeeded, billions of people would have died from the ensuing upheaval. The son of a bitch had tried to burn me alive, and I sometimes wish I’d left him to die in the firestorm he’d intended for me. Instead, he was rotting away on Maersk, serving fifty years for fraud, embezzlement, conspiracy, kidnapping, attempted murder (including mine), and generally being an asshole. I entertained the notion of asking these three parolees if they had seen him, but the discussion probably wouldn’t end well. What would be the point in reminding them they’d been in prison?