Windswept Page 2

  There were four colony seeders en route for refueling, but there was no way to tell if any of them were the ship Bloombeck had talked about. I scrolled them away until I saw the ships I knew were the real deal. I’d dug their names out of news reports, stolen Big Three financials, and all the gossipy whispering that traveled around Occupied Space faster than light. I smiled as I saw them: fifteen LiaoCon Xinzang-Class ore processors coming in from Nanqu. Fifteen claustrophobic nightmares filled with choking gases and horrible rations and enough people who would want to jump ship even if there weren’t a sprawling city at the bottom of the anchor. I had been making payments to people who ran orbital traffic control, enough for them to run broadcasts on my behalf and keep quiet. There was always a chance they could screw me over at the last minute, but that was a risk worth taking. Besides, the messages they’d broadblasted into space made a point of telling people to ask for me by name, all but ensuring I’d get the credit for them joining the Union.

  I watched the queue for a few more minutes. The LiaoCon ships were still four hours away – a little tight for my timing, but I’d be able to take care of business before the miners started their descent.

  Business. Gah. I blinked up the time: quarter past four. Damn Tonggow for ditching me at the last minute. How a woman that scatterbrained could make a rum as good as Old Windswept was a mystery. How she managed to keep her distillery running was an even bigger mystery. She’d been doing something right, though, for her to keep producing as well as she did, and, as long as she kept it together long enough for me to buy the place off her, I could make sure there was always a steady supply of Old Windswept...

  My scalp tingled at the thought of the still running dry. I sipped my tea, but it was too late. My fingers grew cold, and my eyeballs watered, and that voice scraped across the back of my brain, dry as bagasse and sharp as nails: You really think they’re going to make it? You pushed away a good thing with Bloombeck, like you push away everything good, and now Tonggow’s not here, and you’ll never make it to six o’clock…

  The breeze blew through the seaward windows again, carrying the cool green from the ricewheat paddies and the cane fields way out in the kampong, the bite from cane diesel engine exhaust, the heavy tones of coral carbon being spun into lifter cable. The first Breaches had called it getting windswept, back when they came down the cable and decided that their lives were worth more than their Indentures to the Big Three. It sure as hell beat holing up in Thronehill on the corporate side of the fence with the office drones, all of them breathing triple-scrubbed air and never getting a noseful of this. I breathed deep, forcing myself to relax, tamping back The Fear. I would not let it get out. Not today.

  Big Lily walked up with my tea. “One of these days, I really will call Soni to bust that twerp,” I said.

  “I would think Captain Baghram would be busy fighting real crime,” said Big Lily, setting down the mug. “Besides, you’d have to catch him doing something illegal, and I don’t think even Bloombeck is stupid enough to try that in here.”

  “Soni and I are good enough friends that she’d do that for me,” I said. “Especially if I paid her off.”

  She made a face. “I’m sure she’d charge you a pretty penny to lock him up. Save your money. It’s not worth dipping into your budget for the likes of Bloombeck.” She got a fresh bottle of Nelson’s Column from underneath the bar. “You want a little extra?”

  “You know I don’t drink until after six o’clock.”

  “Yeah, though I’ve never understood why.”

  “Girl’s got to keep some mystery.”

  “What’s the fun in that?” she said, opening the bottle. She gagged, and some of the rum splashed on the bartop.

  “What?” I said, and then the smell hit me, like mustard and raw sewage. My eyes watered as my throat tightened. “Christ, Lily!”

  People ran for the windows, and someone hit the massive fans that kept the place cool during the peak of summer. The air freshened, though the stink lingered, the puddle staining the bartop’s finish with yellow streaks. “You ought to tell your friends in the Co-Op about that,” said Big Lily as she capped the bottle and tucked it into a trashcan.

  “What, you, too?” I said, eyeing the stain. What looked like steam rose from its lightening surface.

  “Me, what?” said Big Lily.

  “Everyone thinks I have some magic pull with the Co-Op, just ’cause I’m talking with Tonggow,” I said.

  She grabbed a rag to clean the bar, eyeing the now-fizzing discoloration. Then tossed the skunked bottle in the bin and pulled up Beaulieu’s Blend instead. “Well, I hope you work things out with her. You’ve been talking about buying her place as long as she’s been talking about retiring. And better you than someone else. She makes a hell of a rum, and I’d like it to stay that way.”

  She didn’t know the half of it. I eyed the Beaulieu’s and blinked up the clock. Four twenty-seven. Jesus.

  I blinked up the two numbers that ruled my life: the number of people I’d recruited into the Union, and my cash reserve. I knew both numbers by heart, since they hadn’t changed in the past six months: 467 and 120,300. I’d fought like hell to get those people included in my headcount, and I’d scrimped to keep that bank account as filled as possible. It was enough money to buy out Tonggow now, but I needed the pension and completion bonus to get through the first few years of production. And I wouldn’t get there until I’d recruited five hundred people. It was so close I could taste my first batch of Old Windswept. Those mining ships would come in, those people would emerge from the can with my name on their lips, and I’d never have to deal with this crap ever again.

  “You looked at your numbers again,” said Big Lily.

  “You bet I did,” I said.

  “Just don’t go crazy with it,” she said, pouring a splash of Beaulieu’s into a rocks glass and giving it a swirl. “Take it from a Shareholder who’s been in your shoes: what you do for the Union is important, but being your own boss? That’s more important.” She took a sip, then nodded. “At least Bill Beaulieu is still up to standard.”

  “I’m sure he’d be thrilled,” I said.

  “Hey, he was a Breach once, just like you, just like me,” said Big Lily. “He came here with nothing, did the same shit-work we all did, and he earned his way up and out. If a nice guy like him can make it, you’re a shoo-in.” She laughed, and I blinked away my numbers.

  “It hasn’t happened yet,” I said. “Besides, those people might not Breach after all. Some other recruiter might nab them for their headcount. Carmody or Leslie Paik. Even Neil Scoon might rouse himself from his tomato patch to get ’em.”

  “Or Saarien,” said Big Lily.

  “Especially Saarien,” I said. “You know how many Breaches he’s pinched from me?”

  “I think we all do, Padma.”

  I sagged onto the bartop, careful to avoid the stain. “Every time I’ve gotten close to adding someone to my headcount, he snatches them away. Like those economists! You have any idea what we could do with that kind of expertise in Brushhead?”

  Big Lily shook her head.

  “Me, neither, but I’d have done something with them. Instead, he keeps ’em all working in that deathtrap he calls a refinery, sucking away funding from the rest of us. Hell, now he’s talking about turning Sou’s Reach into an artisan community!”

  “That’d be something,” said Big Lily.

  “He stood up at the last Union Board meeting and said, ‘We need to acknowledge and nurture our innate creativity.’ Walked away with a hundred thousand yuan to make glassware or some crap like that. Just because he has the highest headcount on the planet.”

  “I know he’s pissed you off by poaching bodies from you, but that’s how it was even during the peak times. Everyone wants out of their Slots, and recruiters want to make their numbers.”

  “Yeah, but does he have to be such a dick about it?”

  Big Lily shrugged. “Evanrute Saarien may an a
sshole, but he’s a loyal asshole.”

  I almost spat on the bar, then thought better of it. “To himself, sure.”

  “And to the Union,” said Big Lily, wiping the highball glasses clean. “He’s gone to the mat for his people, got his head cracked in the same picket lines as the rest of us. He may get wrapped up in all his speeches about the Struggle, but we’re on the same side, Padma.”

  “His ego crowds out anyone else on his side.”

  Big Lily shook her head. “You sure you’re not pissed because of what he used to do? A little transference, maybe?”

  “Saarien isn’t the only former Corporate recruiter here,” I said. “What about Chenisse Lau? I used to hang out with her a lot.”

  “You used to get in fights with her a lot,” said Big Lily. “Remember that year I banned you both from here?”

  “She started it,” I said, looking into my tea. “Saying I didn’t pay attention to my Ward. What the hell did she know?”

  “My point, Padma,” said Big Lily, “is that, while I can appreciate your desire to get your payout, there’s still plenty here to focus on. Chenisse was right: your Ward has to come first.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me to go along with Bloombeck for the good of the Ward–”

  “Oh, hell, no!” Big Lily laughed. “But what you did for Odd? That’s what you should be doing more of. Especially since it gets you stuff like this.” She put a plate of kumara cakes before me.

  I smelled the sweet steamy cakes. “Oh, you are a doll.” I broke open a cake and took a bite, the hot filling burning my tongue.

  Big Lily shook her head, then took out a fluted tasting glass off the rack behind her. She set it down in front of me, next to the bottle of Beaulieu’s.

  “I told you, it’s not after six,” I said, reaching for another cake.

  “It’s not for you,” she said, nodding to the other end of the room. I followed her chin and saw a guy sitting by the window. He wasn’t really my type, but he had a chest like a rum barrel and eyes that didn’t look too hard. “He’s been watching you all afternoon.”

  “You have the best way of looking out for your customers.”

  “It’s my job to know what my customers need,” said Big Lily, throwing me a wink and walking to the other end of the bar.

  I grabbed my tea and the bottle and the glass and walked over to the window. The man with the not-hard eyes looked up at me.

  “I like your taste,” he said, flicking his eyes at the rum.

  “It’s not my favorite,” I said, sitting down across from him. He had a circle of stars around his Union ink, the sign of someone who’d put in time on the anchor. “But I still like to share it.”

  He nodded as I poured him a shot of Beaulieu’s. “Sharing’s good.”

  “So am I.” We clinked glasses.

  Chapter 2

  The only good thing about my former employer damaging my brain was that I didn’t need an alarm clock.

  My eyes popped open just before the muezzin cleared her throat and started the evening Maghrib. The Emerald Masjid stood two blocks away from my building, and its speakers were just in line with my second-story flat. It was like she was in my ear, calling me to prayer along with the rest of the faithful. I blinked up a clock: five forty-two. Almost time.

  I slipped out of my bed and into my bra and pants. As I pulled on a shirt, Anchor Boy stirred, one muscled arm flopping over where my waist would have been. He had been good – really good – and I really didn’t want to wake him and send him packing. Still, six o’clock was six o’clock, and I wasn’t in the mood to explain what was about to happen. I grabbed his shoulder and shook him.

  “Uh?” he said, his eyes flickering open. “Hi, uh…” He blinked, trying not to be too obvious about pulling up my profile and name. “Padma?”

  “Very polite,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

  He nodded as he levered himself up. “Hey, you’re right. Happy Hour is about to start over at–”

  “No,” I said. “Not time for us to go. Just you.”

  He sank to his elbows. “I do something wrong?”

  “Nope,” I said. “You were great. But I need to be alone now.”

  Anchor Boy gave me a smile, which evaporated when I didn’t return it. He shrugged and got up.

  For a brief moment, when he pulled on his shorts and reached for his coveralls, I thought about saying, No, please, stay. I never had company at six o’clock, and he’d been so attentive in the sack, maybe it would be the same when we had our clothes on...

  No. I had to do this alone, or it wouldn’t work. That’s what Dr Ropata had said, and he’d been right about everything else everything so far. I leaned against the door frame, my hands behind my back, watching Anchor Boy get dressed.

  “Be careful up there,” I said. “Wouldn’t want you to lose focus and press the big stop button.”

  “It’s actually a series of switches,” he said, grabbing his deck jacket and walking to the door. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking if I can call you?”

  “You can try,” I said, tapping my temple. “My pai’s a little messed up, though.”

  He nodded. “Look me up if you ever get it fixed,” he said, then clicked the door behind him.

  I counted to five before leaping up and locking the door. I pulled every window shade closed but for the one in my tiny sitting room, the one that looked out over all of Santee City clear to the ocean and the massive lifter complex offshore. It was a view that would have cost a fortune but for the fact that Marjorie Ling, the landlady, was one of the first Breaches I fished out of the water after I became a recruiter. She still threatened to raise my rent to match the market every year, but a bottle of Still Standing Silver and the reminder that she owed my ass kept the price under control. Marjorie gouged the bejeezus out of her other tenants to make up for it.

  The row houses of Brushhead rolled away on the gentle hills until they ran into the cane plants in Budvar and Faoshue. In the mornings, when the breeze came off the ocean, the smell of molasses and cooking sugar would drift up from the exhaust vents, overpowering every other scent my neighbors made. On some days, like the middle of summer when the refinery at Sou’s Reach had busted and no one had taken a shower in weeks, the smell from the cane plants was the best thing in the world. It was also a better alarm clock than the chimes my pai made despite my turning off that option years ago.

  I watched the sun begin its dip toward the horizon, and the water in the Ivory Canal sparkled like a billion fifty-jiao coins. In the middle of the canal were the rusting boxes of Partridge Hutong, my first home when I came to Santee, and I had to admit even they looked good in this light. There was no way in hell I’d ever go back there, of course, same as I’d never go back to night shifts at the water-treatment plant that had given Brushhead its name. I couldn’t see the plant from my window, and that was a bonus. The pile of rusting pipes and misshapen holding tanks made Partridge look like a palace. The plant may have kept everyone employed, but that didn’t mean I had to love it, not like I loved the rest of the Ward.

  The gentle golden glow sparkled off the rooftops as the neon signs of the bars, strip clubs and churches winked on. Somewhere out there, shifts were changing, people were going to or from work, opening bottles of rum or throwing away the dead soldiers. I took in one more breath, watched the light glint off the lifter ribbon, then closed the last shade, turning the room completely dark. The blackout shades had cost a month’s wages, but they worked better than my old method of tacking heavy blankets over the windows. Looked nicer, too.

  I sat at the kitchen table and reached under, found the candle and bottle I kept there and set them both in front of me. The candle was from an old hurricane kit, one that had been used and refilled a dozen times so far. It wasn’t important. The bottle was.

  It had a triangular base and was made from bumpy green-blue glass. The bottle’s label was a cartoon of a woman’s foot propped up on a lanai railing, ove
rlooking the coast at Saticoy, a few klicks north of here. It was quite a pretty foot, manicured and smooth, and there was a string tied to the big toe. At the other end of the string was a box kite, high up in the cartoon sky, pushed about by some men in clouds, blowing on the thing. I had been using this bottle of Old Windswept for the past year, and it would last me another six months, if I was careful. And I was always careful.

  The bottle was cool and comforting in my hand, like a heat sink drawing away all the tension from the work day. Hour after hour of dealing with angry people unhappy with their shifts, their supervisors, their Contract slots, and, just for extra texture, having to fend off Vytai Bloombeck–

  I winced at the stabbing pain in my right eye and groaned. God, just thinking about him made my pai twitch. Terrific.

  The pain receded, and I blinked back the video buffer to earlier this afternoon. I watched Bloombeck’s offer again, just to remind myself that turning him down had been the right thing to do. “Forty Breaches!” he said, and I blinked it off. Enough.

  I caught a lick of afternoon breeze and smiled. The same wind had caught me the first time I’d stepped out of the WalWa office in Thronehill, and I hadn’t looked back. I could do the same with Bloombeck’s deal. I could do the same with The Fear, scraping around up in there, especially now that it was six o’clock.

  I lit the candle, and it sent out a warm yellow glow, like my flat was inside a stick of butter. I watched the flame dance to my breath, then closed my eyes and did what Dr Ropata prescribed all those years ago: I imagined me, sitting at my table, the candle and bottle in front of me. Then I let the camera in my mind pull back until I was outside my building, looking down over Brushhead. Then, farther back, until I could see the entire city below me, a smudge of buildings and streets in the middle of hectares and hectares of swaying green industrial sugarcane stalks. Then, even farther back, until I was above Santee Anchorage, where I could see the thin black line of the lifter reaching up to the orbital anchor, now surrounded by ships coming and going.