Like a Boss Read online

  A few moments later, a beat-up covered lorry pulled up to the bus stop, and the passenger-side window rolled down. “Get in,” said a girl’s voice. The parolees gathered their gear and hopped into the back. The girl leaned toward the side window to get a better look at them, then at me. Her eyes went wide, and so did mine. She was one of my employees, a Freeborn kid named Ly Huang. I didn’t mind my people moonlighting, so long as they did it when they weren’t supposed to be on my clock. “Oy!” I yelled, stepping toward the lorry.

  Ly Huang’s face disappeared from the mirror, and the lorry rumbled away in a cloud of cane diesel exhaust. I blinked in pictures of the lorry’s tailgate, only to see that it didn’t have a license tag. The parolees all looked at me from the back, hunger in their eyes. What the hell had that kid gotten mixed up in? Is this what Marolo couldn’t tell me over the phone? Sweet and Merciful Buddha, this was not how being a member of the landed gentry was supposed to go.

  I made a note to yell at Marolo about this withheld information and blinked up the time: three fifty-nine. I was going to have to spring for a tuk-tuk. I blinked a text to the We Laugh At Physics Travel Corporation, aka the company my protégé Jilly ran. She had put aside her dreams of becoming an airship pilot as the planetary economy slowed. Santee Anchorage still sent more industrial molasses up the cable than any system within a six-jump radius, but the demand for everything else we made had dwindled. It made more sense for a young woman Jilly’s age to keep schlepping people around on the surface than via the air.

  She’d done really well for herself since her days as a cab driver, even joining the Union and earning a fist on her cheek. But she could never get a pai, not unless we convinced the right people with the right tech and the right skills to hop down to our dirtball. In the meantime, though, she carried a battered handheld that I could text at a moment’s notice. Now was one of those moments. Need pickup to avoid horrible catastrophe, I texted.

  On it, Boss, she texted back. The kid had gotten really good at typing.

  Two minutes later, a candy apple red tuk-tuk screeched to a halt in front of the bus stop. A young woman with biceps like coconuts huddled behind the wheel. “The boss sends her regards,” she said as I hopped in behind her.

  “What, she couldn’t get behind the wheel herself?”

  The driver turned and laughed over her shoulder. “Not unless there’s a race for beer money.”

  “Sometimes I wish that kid had stuck with flight school,” I said.

  “I don’t,” said the big woman. “Jilly’s pay rates are great, and she lets us take our tuk-tuks home.”

  “Is that an issue?”

  “When you’ve got tuk-tuks getting boosted from every depot in the city, it sure is.”

  “Well, that’s a damn shame,” I said. “There was a time when no one screwed with the Drivers’ Committee. Not unless they wanted to get their own teeth fed to them.”

  “We’ll find the thieves, don’t you worry,” said the woman, and I felt sorry for whoever was going to be on the business end of her fists. She wore a tailored blouse that managed to make her look businesslike and even more physically impressive than if she’d worn a tank top. Her arms and shoulders bulged as she fiddled with the tuk-tuk’s console. She had either spent her life slinging bundles of cane or winning prize fights. Maybe both. “What’s your name?”

  “Sirikit.”

  I held out my hand. “Padma Mehta. You know where we’re going?”

  Sirikit nodded as she crushed my hand. “The Old Windswept Distillery, right?”

  “You got it.”

  “I’ll have you there in twenty minutes.”

  “But it’s a forty minute drive to Tanque.”

  Sirikit flexed her neck as she turned toward the steering wheel. “Not the way I drive.” She punched the stereo to life, and Balinese opera blasted out from the speakers. I had just enough time to buckle in before we took off like enthusiastic bullets.

  TWO

  Nineteen minutes and forty-two seconds later (I had blinked up a timer, because watching it kept my mind off the terror of Sirikit cutting around cargo lorries and land trains at ridiculously unsafe speeds), the tuk-tuk came to a gentle halt in front of the two simple pourform huts that housed the Old Windswept Distillery. Estella Tonggow, the late founder, had been a brilliant chemist and designer. And, as I dug deeper into the books, I learned she had also found new and interesting ways to redefine “frugal.” While other distillers built fancy facilities with verandas and swooping lines, Tonggow had spent the bare minimum on two buildings that required no maintenance and could withstand force ten winds. The place was as ugly as a swamp hog’s backside, but it was what happened inside that counted.

  Marolo stood outside the entrance, his face streaked with grease. He held up a caneplas box that rattled as he shook it. I could tell that he wanted to talk about the box and its contents, but it could wait. “Shouldn’t Ly Huang be here?”

  He gave me a crooked smile. “Ah. I’m glad you decided to dispense with the small talk and get right to work.”

  “I’d like her to get right to work. Why did I see her driving a lorry when she should be helping crush cane?”

  “We’ll get to that.” He tipped the box toward me. “These bearings are shot.”

  I peered at the two dozen metal balls inside the box, all bouncing off each other as he shook it. “We just replaced these! Hell, I just replaced them.”

  “They’re defective,” he said. “They worked for about a hundred hours, and then they started pitting.”

  I picked up a bearing and cursed. What should have been a perfect sphere looked like it had been nicked and scratched with forty-grit sandpaper. I sucked on my teeth to calm myself, because I knew there was no point in getting angry at Marolo.

  “You need me to stick around?” asked Sirikit from the driver’s seat.

  “Please.” I turned back to Marolo and held up the bearing. “These were rated for ten thousand hours, if I recall.”

  “Fifteen thousand, actually,” said Marolo. “I made sure we saved the boxes. And the receipts. On paper.”

  “Paper?” I shook my head. “Whatever happened to using a tablet?”

  “You know anyone on this rock making replacement tablet parts?” He shook the box. “These were relatively cheap. Getting circuitry to fix a busted tablet would cost more than you pay me in a year.”

  “I pay you a lot.”

  “That you do,” said Marolo. “But unless you know of someone growing computer hardware on Santee, I’ll stick to paper. I can always get more of it.”

  I dropped the ruined ball bearing back into the box. “When can we get more of these?”

  “We have them. I told you they were cheap.”

  I sighed. “Then why in hell did you haul me all the way out here? Is it so I can fire Ly Huang? You know you have the power to do that without my say-so.”

  “Ly Huang’s absence is one of the many things I wanted to talk with you about, starting with the way this place runs,” said Marolo. He put the box on the ground. “Those bearings are just the icing on the ridiculous cake.”

  “I told you this was going to be a weird gig.”

  “Yeah, but not that it was going to be like this!” said Marolo, pointing back at the distillery. “You have machinery that dates back to the Information Age! You’re using parts that break down when there are upgrades that will last until the heat death of the universe! You’ve got people beating cane with cricket bats!”

  I shrugged. “It’s the way Madame Tonggow did it.”

  He threw his hands into the air. “And there it is. The one thing that everyone says when I question why they’re doing the stupid thing that they’re doing. ‘Estella Tonggow always did it this way, so that’s why we keep doing it.’ Why, Padma? For God’s sake, why do you keep invoking that woman like she’s the Creator?”

  “Because she is,” I said. “She made this distillery and this rum, and whatever she did we are going to kee
p on doing because it works.”

  “But even she must have improvised or changed or–”

  I held up a hand to Marolo’s chest. “I don’t care. If we want to keep making Old Windswept Rum, that means we make it her way. We don’t have the room to experiment, especially since neither of us are chemists like she was.”

  “We can find chemists.”

  “And they are welcome to monkey around with their own formulas in their own labs. But not here.” In the back of my head, The Fear uncoiled itself, its frozen breath sending shivers down my spine. Maybe you should tell him why?

  Marolo actually took a step back. I cleared my throat. “Look, I appreciate you looking out for this place. I know it all seems weird–”

  “– because it is–”

  “– but it’s only been eighteen months since I’ve taken over. Madame Tonggow had thirty years of experience running the distillery, and that was after another thirty years of playing with MacDonald Heavy’s chemistry sets.” I laughed. “All my time at the plant didn’t set me up for the intricacies of her operation. That’s why I hired you.”

  He made a face. “I thought it was because the previous foreman had quit on you.”

  “So we had some personal friction.” I put an arm around his shoulder and guided him up to the press house. “That always happens when an outfit changes hands. And, hey, hasn’t this gig been better than schlepping cane out of the kampong?”

  He nodded. “It’s certainly weirder.”

  “No arguments there.”

  Marolo stopped at the door to the press house and opened it for me. There was no need for a lock because there was nothing inside worth stealing. Everything was third-hand and held together with baling wire and foul language. The giant rollers on the cane press were scarred and scratched and completely worthless even for scrap. The still itself, a conglomeration of funnels, coils, pots and pans, all made from copper or coral steel or, in the case of the second condenser, palm fronds, wouldn’t have gotten more than a couple of yuan because there would have been no way to take it out the door except in tiny pieces.

  I took a whiff of the air inside: machine oil, damp metal, and the bright green scent of crushed cane juice. Bits of bagasse littered the floor, and the giant rollers glinted in the afternoon light. “These still need a wiping,” I said, walking up to the rollers as The Fear hissed about how good it would feel to stick my head between them and see how quickly they’d crush me. The Fear, in addition to being a bully, was also stupid as hell, seeing how it would go along with my brain. Yet another thing to bring up to a shrink.

  “I know, but that’s somebody else’s job.”

  I turned around and gave him a look. “Spoken like a Union diehard.”

  He chuckled without mirth. “You take that back.”

  “I will if you tell me why the rollers aren’t clean.”

  Marolo grimaced. “I had someone who was doing that, but then she up and left.”

  “Who?”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Ly Huang’s been here almost as long as you have, and I thought she liked it. Hell, she’s one of the few people who doesn’t wince when I sing with whatever bollypop comes over the wireless. If anything, she sings louder than me.”

  “You haven’t been here in a while,” he said, grabbing a couple of towels from a work bench and tossing me one. “Two weeks ago, she showed up long enough to clear out her locker and tell me to take my job and shove it.”

  “What?”

  He nodded. “Caught me off guard, too. She told me off, then she walked away.”

  “Except I saw her today, in Brushhead, driving a lorry.”

  He gave me a look. “You sure it was her?”

  “She took off as soon as she saw I saw her. It was her.”

  I got to work wiping down the rollers with Marolo. While some distilleries contracted out their pressings, Tonggow had insisted on keeping the whole process in-house. She even owned the land where the cane was grown, saying the terroir was vital. The fact that the faces of the rollers were scratched and dented were also vital. Everything, as far as I was concerned, was vital, because continued to work for me. I tested every new batch, which was an odd experience. For years, I’d hoarded bottles of Old Windswept, never cracking a new one until I’d drained the previous. Now I got to dip into the supply whenever I wanted. The Fear hated that. I loved it.

  But leaving cane juice on the press, that was a no-no. The rollers’ beat-up surface meant that all kinds of lovely bacteria would grow if left alone. Every day, the press had to be wiped down, then sanitized with vinegar (not bleach, because, again, Tonggow) to make sure nothing contaminated the freshly squeezed cane juice. Marolo and I knocked it out within fifteen minutes. “Did Ly Huang say anything before she left?”

  Marolo grunted. “Other than that I was a sellout, giving up my natural born rights to keep a rotten system going.”

  “Since when was she into labor theory?”

  He shook his head. “You know how these kids are. One day, they’re plugging away, happy as clams. The next, they’re railing about worker exploitation.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it happens all the time.”

  The rollers cleaned, we wheeled over an ancient hydraulic jack to the press’s left side. I coiled chain around the axle, and we took turns loosening the seven-centimeter bolts that kept the rotor housing in place. We always did the left side first because it was what Tonggow did. Also, it always stuck more, so doing the right side would feel easy.

  I finished the last bolt and handed it to Marolo. He handed me a packet of new ball bearings, and I slipped them into place. “So, we’re only going to get a hundred hours out of these?”

  “If we’re lucky,” he said. “I’m no engineer, but even I can tell inferior materials when I see them. All this equipment that Tonggow insisted on using, it’s all crap.”

  I made sure the bearings were set, then refit the housing. I had to give it an extra tap with the butt of the wrench. “But it’s cheap crap.”

  “Which you will not be able to afford in a few years.”

  I gave him a sideways glare. “Worrying about the books is my problem.”

  “Well, it’s everyone’s when we depend on the paycheck.” He had rinsed and dried the bolts, making sure to wipe some palm oil on the threads. “You know, I talked with the old-timers, the ones who’ve stayed on. They said that Tonggow was rich as hell, that she blew all kinds of cash.”

  “That she did.” The bolts were numbered, so I put number one into place and started cranking. “But her fortune is still tied up in probate, and it wasn’t connected to the distillery. I don’t have that kind of money, and I don’t think I ever will.”

  “Maybe if you found that missing case of Ten-Year.”

  “Oh, God. I’ve told you: there’s no such thing. We don’t age our rum that long anymore.”

  “But we should,” said Marolo. “I’ve always got people telling me they’d pay top yuan for a shot.”

  “Then they can buy a barrel of our Classic and let it sit for a decade. They want Tonggow’s mystique, and we don’t have that any more. We’ve just got the old standby, and that brings in enough money to keep us all happy.”

  “But what will you do if that runs out?”

  “Work, just like I always have.” I put in bolt number two and took a breath before tightening it. This one always threatened to go out of alignment and strip its threads.

  Marolo cleared his throat. “And, um, what about us?”

  Ah. I gave number two a crank and rested the wrench against my leg. “I told you when you came on board there were no guarantees. The chances are still really good that I’ll bring this whole distillery down in flames. I might even do it literally, since Old Windswept is one hundred and fifty proof.”

  “Please don’t joke about that,” said Marolo, handing me bolt number three. “I did enough slash-and-burn drills when I was a kid.” He snorted. “Dig
, cover, hold, my ass.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about that, seeing how Tonggow made everything out of metal and pourform.” I cranked in the bolt and reached for number four. “Are you really that worried, Marolo? Am I mismanaging this place?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you’ve sure implied it.”

  He quirked his mouth and held up bolt number five. “I know you are incredibly busy back in Brushhead. I just want to make sure you’re aware of everything that’s going on here.”

  “Like the fact that you and I are the only ones here on a Thursday afternoon?”

  “Ah. So you are aware.”

  I cranked in the last two bolts. “Ly Huang’s not the only one who’s left, is she?”

  “Well, she’s the only one I can’t get a hold of.”

  “Where is everyone else, then?”

  Marolo looked away as we lowered the roller back in place. “I think everyone else has quit without quitting.”

  I stopped the jack in mid-crank. “I’ve heard of a lot of passive-aggressive labor moves in my time, but this sounds new.”

  “Nobody wants to come in because they’re convinced you’re going to lay them off.”

  “Well, people do tend to lose their jobs when they don’t perform them.”

  Marolo took a breath, then caught himself before he could speak. Two years I’d worked with him, and he was never one to beat around the bush. It was one of his better qualities, and certainly one I wanted in the person in charge of maintaining production of the one thing that kept me sane. Whatever he had to say, it was going to be big, and probably a bit weird.

  “This is a hard thing for all of us,” he said. “You know how rare it is for us Freeborn to leave the kampong and work in the city. It just doesn’t feel right, the way all you Union people stare off into space when you’re typing with your eyes.”