Windswept Page 5

  “Jimney, who do you think pays that fee?”

  He screwed up his face, like I’d just asked him to calculate the trajectories of every can coming down to sea. It was one thing to deal with someone who’s windswept, but people who made their own magic breeze required extra patience.

  Finally, he said, “Oh, yeah. That’s really deep, Padma. It’s all a big cycle.”

  “Right,” I said, doing my best to steer his stoned logic back to the topic at hand, “and the big cycle needs new members, and new members might be arriving on that colony seeder. What can you tell me about them?”

  “The ship’s got a real pretty name,” said Jimney. He smiled, and his eyes glazed over.

  I thumped the door, and his whole body shook. “I know,” I said. “Tell me about the Breaches.”

  “What?”

  “The Breaches. On the colony seeder.”

  “What colony seeder?”

  “The one making the water drop in six days,” I said, forcing my hands into my pants pockets so they wouldn’t go around his scrawny neck.

  “What do you want to know about that?”

  “Everything.”

  “OK,” he said, digging through his filthy coveralls. “Um, last week, I was cleaning the executive lounge, working the stalls, you know?”

  “Not really.”

  “I had the stall door closed so I could scrub off the graffiti–”

  I put a hand over my mouth to hide my smirk. The only graffiti in this building was written by me. I made a point of freshening it up every few months, just to remind the WalWa people the Union was there, ready for them if they ever wanted to join.

  “So, I got the door closed, and these guys come in, and they’re talking about this ship having crew trouble, and I caught the name...”

  “Which is?” I blinked up the shipping queue. I’d spent the past six months focusing on the mining ships and hadn’t bothered to pay attention to everything else in transit. I cursed as I saw there were a lot of blank data fields. No way to tell which was the seeder.

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding a little too much. “And then, a few days later, I’m in the burn room, sweeping the shreds back to the fire before I leave my clothes behind–”

  “Hold it,” I said. “You leave your clothes behind?”

  “Yeah,” Jimney said, fingering the black streaks on his coveralls. “Always burn it at the end of the week. WalWa policy. Plus, I don’t have to do laundry.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, I’m sweeping the shreds, finishing up, and these two goons are walking outside the burn room, and I hear them talking. They’re all worked up, because they got this security alert, saying there are, like, forty people causing trouble on this ship. I hear them say it’s on the way–”

  “What is its name?” I said. “And when is it making its fuel drop?”

  “Oh, wow,” said Jimney. “Hold on. Lemme think. Numbers make my head hurt.”

  I wondered if this happened to anyone in a citywide office. Is this why my boss had wanted to spend all his time in the local titty bars instead of being out in the field?

  “I got it!” Jimney said with a broad smile. “The Rose of Tralee. They were making landfall today.”

  “Today? Bloombeck told me it was in six days.”

  “Hey, how is he?” said Jimney. “I haven’t seen him in, like, almost a week. Said he was buying next time we got together. Is he here? Should we go say hi?”

  Before Jimney could move, I stepped back into the hall and slammed the closet door shut. He made a few feeble protests as I barricaded him in with a trash barrel. He’d get out eventually, but right now I had to lose as much deadweight as possible.

  I blinked up the queue again, and there it was, an hour from hitting orbit: the Rose of Tralee, a WalWa colony seeder fresh in from Goodluck, bound for someplace in the Beyond. Now Bloombeck’s story made sense; Santee wasn’t popular for local traffic, but it was one of the last fuel stops before jumping past the boundaries of Occupied Space. Leaving Santee was, essentially, a one-way trip. That, plus all that travel time (two years out of Goodluck to jump, then two years to here, then two more years to the Red Line and Beyond) gave the crew plenty of time to contemplate how long and shitty the voyage ahead could be.

  Plus, forty Breaches. That would easily put me over the top, give me a few Breaches to pass on to other recruiters to put them in my debt. I’d always have a need for labor, Union or otherwise, and it would go a long way toward helping the distillery succeed.

  Still, Jesus! Just like Bloombeck to get his timing messed up. This would have been great news a week ago. Now, it was just a potential pain in my ass.

  I slipped outside the main building, smiling and waving to the stone-faced receptionist as I ran to the tuk-tuk.

  “Padma, I been thinking,” said Bloombeck, climbing out of the tuk-tuk. “It’s not fair, the price we agreed on. I want to up it to three fifty–”

  I grabbed him by the shoulder and flipped him out to the ground. “Drive,” I said. Bloombeck howled in protest as Jilly stomped on the gas. “Head for the coast.”

  “Anywhere in particular, boss?” asked Jilly as she dodged a caravan of WalWa Indentures biking toward the main office. I heard the cry of Union parasite! before we skidded around a corner.

  “Sou’s Reach,” I said, “and go faster than you did before.”

  Jilly nodded and steered us onto the sidewalk. We passed the line of vehicles at the exit cordon, and I waved to the still-naked goon as we bounced onto Brapati Causeway. The tuk-tuk’s engine protested, but she didn’t let up until the first whiffs of rotting sugar hit us thirty-six minutes later.

  Chapter 5

  The Recovery launches weren’t so much boats as they were planks with delusions of seaworthiness, and the sailors lounging around were in danger of being overrun by empty rum jugs. None of them looked competent or sober enough to do anything, which made things that much easier when a black-and-yellow police bumblecar screeched to a halt in front of the Recovery office and disgorged six cops who proceeded to arrest their way in. As soon as the cops cleared the dock, I tore a blue boy in half and gave one piece to Jilly. “Find me something big enough to haul forty people and you get the other half.”

  She protested until I held up two more C-notes. As she scurried away to steal something appropriate, I bounced to the launches. They were even more terrifying up close, less ships than collections of scabby paint and rusted parts. I hopped onto the least cancerous of the boats, fired up the cane diesel engines, and hoped for the best as I cast off. The launch gurgled and creaked as it hit wake, and the noises only got worse once I turned into open water.

  No one else in the harbor made a move toward the smoke columns, now turning white from steam. That was encouraging: no one from another Ward had managed to get the jump on me, and the lack of WalWa traffic meant I just might pull this off. I cranked the throttle up to maximum, despite the engine’s whining protests. The smell of heated saltwater filled my nose, along with boiled fish. Hot drops were hell on sea life.

  Soon, the cans were in sight: four gray cylinders, each thirty meters long bobbling along the swell, their heat shields acting as ballast. Scorch marks from the re-entry scored their sides, and I wondered if they were dropped on purpose or by accident. Drop cans could withstand the fall, but the G-forces were brutal to anyone stowing away inside. Most Breaches preferred to hitch a ride just before the empty cans were strung on the lifter’s downward cable, hoping the cans’ shielding would protect them from Santee’s Van Allen belts. Either was a tough way to jump ship.

  I pulled alongside the closest can and tossed cane rubber fenders over the side to keep the boat from smashing on the can’s hull. Proper protocol for Recovery involved a lot of decontamination and quarantine, but I was in a hurry. I grabbed the biggest wrench I could find on the launch and banged three times on the can. The thick steel rang, hollow like a cave.

  Then there was an answer: a furious pound
ing from inside, and the unmistakable cry of “Get us the hell out of here!” Us. Oh, that was a sweet sound. I scooted the launch up to an access hatch, and, despite the poor condition of the tools on board, managed to crack the seal and open. “Anyone in there injured?”

  “Yes!” came a chorus of voices. Excellent. I knew those How to Breach pamphlets had been a good investment.

  “Good,” I said, tugging on the hatch as hard I could. “Then, on behalf of the Santee Anchorage Local of the Universal Freelancer’s Union and the Ward of Brushhead, I’d like to offer you assist–”

  The hatch gave, and I tumbled back on my ass. When I stood up, five pasty people in damp WalWa coveralls looked up at me.

  “OK,” I said, wiping the rust off my hands. “Get on board, and tell everyone else to step lively.”

  “There’s just us,” said one of them, a woman with a ruined smoker’s voice. She was all muscle and had a patch over her right eye. Her face was bright red and wealed by burn scars, crinkling what looked like a tattoo of crossed wrenches. For the briefest of moments, I thought I knew her. No, I knew I knew her, even though I had never met a one-eyed ship’s engineer in my life. Was she someone from my days in the Life Corporate? No, that was impossible. No one from my previous life had ever Breached.

  I held out a hand, and she took it with a grunt. I shuddered as she squeezed so hard I felt my fingers pop. I may not have known her, but I was sure I wouldn’t like her.

  The others followed her: a pair of old ladies whose ink had faded, a gaunt white guy whose coveralls were three sizes too big, and a middle-aged woman dragging a body by the shoulders. They all huddled on the deck like sheep, glancing up at the sky, as if they expected a WalWa security boat to smash down on them.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, let’s get the others.”

  “What others?” said the gaunt man. BANKS was stitched over his left breast pocket, and he had scales tattooed on his cheek. A lawyer. Great.

  “There are supposed to be forty of you,” I said.

  Banks shook his head. “Just six. Well, I guess that’s if you want to include Thanh.” He nodded at the body.

  I looked at him, then climbed over the lot of them to the hatch of the fuel can. There was nothing but the smell of rank seawater. The only pings I got were from these six, and one had no lifesigns. I looked back at him. “My source told me that me that forty of you were going to Breach.”

  Banks shrugged. “There were just the six of us awake. I mean, unless some of those fishsticks were thinking about it, but it’s not like they could tell us–”

  I grabbed him by the front of his coveralls. “THERE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE FORTY OF YOU.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he said, and the way his eyes went wide and watery told me enough. There were only five Breaches, six with the corpse. I was short of meeting my obligation. Vytai Bloombeck had lied to me, and, worst of all, I’d fallen for it.

  I thumped the side of the can, and it rang back, hollow. I could hear The Fear laughing, its chainsaw voice bouncing around my skull. I rubbed my temples, pushed back the tingling paralysis creeping up my spine. No, no, I would not give in, I could make it until tomorrow night–

  And then the breeze picked up, strong enough to blow away the smell of re-entry boiled fish and carbon. It came from far out to sea, heavy with salt spray, just a little chill in the warm morning. Out of habit, I inhaled, brought the smell through my nose and right into my brain. It had been so long since I’d been on the open water that I’d forgotten just how clean the air was out here. Brushhead didn’t have real air pollution, but it was all such a riot of smells that it masked the tang of the deep, deep sea.

  My new passengers didn’t pick up on this, of course. How could they? They’d spent years stuffed inside a floating tin can, breathing recycled farts in the musty seeder’s air; their noses were shot to hell. I wanted to tell these people to breathe deep, enjoy their new freedom, but all of the recruitment talk could wait.

  “Well,” I said, “this isn’t what any of us were expecting, so let’s just get to shore and we’ll worry about the rest later. Is anyone injur–”

  I got a tickle behind my eye. It wasn’t as bad as the Bloomie-Is-Nigh alert, but it was enough to make me nervous. Something was coming. I steered us so the shoreline was in view and saw sunlight glint on the water. I blinked in a zoom and saw four WalWa skiffs zipping toward us. “Oh, shit,” I said, cranking the throttle to maximum and bringing us around.

  “What are you doing?” said Banks.

  “Getting a move on,” I said, nodding at the skiffs.

  “But we’re heading out to sea!”

  “Look,” I said, dodging the can, “in twenty minutes, those boats will be within firing range. They’ll hose us down with riot foam, which will freeze us in place, and then you are beyond fucked. Me, they’ll just rough up, but you? You’ll never see daylight again.”

  “And I appreciate that,” said Banks, “but wouldn’t we be safer on land?”

  “Yes, which is why you’re going to do what I tell you to.” I grabbed his skinny shoulders, pulled him in front of me, then put his hands on the wheel and throttle. Then I started to get undressed.

  He blinked and looked away. “OK, I might have hit my head during re-entry, so I may just be imagining this–”

  I grabbed his face, and he jammed his eyes shut. “I need you to keep your shit together,” I said. “I also need you to open your eyes so I can send you instructions.”

  “My pai isn’t working well,” he said.

  “Is it working well enough for me to send you a picture?”

  He nodded.

  “Then open your fucking eyes, please.”

  Banks did, and our pais did a handshake. I sent him a photo of the coastline, making sure to highlight the Emerald Masjid, then sent a shot of Jilly. “When I let go, start a count to twenty. Then point the boat toward that green tower in the first picture there. When you get to shore, that girl in the second picture will be waiting for you. Do not go with anyone but her, got it?”

  He nodded.

  “Good.” I patted his cheek. “See you around, Counselor,” I said, then jumped overboard.

  Chapter 6

  My balance was a little off, thanks to not making my Six O’Clock. It wasn’t my most graceful dive, but it got me clear of the launch. I worked my way to the surface, thankful it wasn’t mating season for the squid. I would have enough problems with the WalWa skiffs and didn’t need a batch of horny, tentacled beasties thrown into the mix.

  Once I got topside, I was glad to see the launch zipping away. I swam toward the WalWa boats, blinking up a distress signal from my pai. I made sure to put it on all channels; some signal buoy would put it out on the Public, which might attract someone who was looking for action. It might also attract anyone allied with Sou’s Reach, but that was a chance I could take. This late in the day Saarien’s minions were probably unconscious or on their way to it.

  The skiffs were half a klick away and gaining. I blinked up a zoom to see if their foam cannons were armed, but could only see the boats hopping over the spray and now heading toward the cans. Better to assume they were ready to fire, which meant getting their attention pronto.

  I blinked up a picture of the skiffs and fired it out to the Public with a landstamp and a note: NOW DROWNING. WALWA NOT COMING TO MY AID. AVENGE ME WITH LAWSUITS AND STRIKES. I waited a few moments, and the skiffs veered hard to port, right toward me, though they had slowed down a bit. Did that mean WalWa had a watch agent on the Public that scanned for anything I said? It had been a while since I’d gotten that kind of rise out of them. I’d have to see what kinds of hoops I could get the boat crews to jump through once they’d hauled me on board.

  Then my head buzzed with a message: we’re coming to get you. stand by. That was quick, seeing how the skiffs were still a ways off. Then I looked at the message signature: banks.

  I kicked and pushed myself up to get a better view and saw the rec
overy launch was heading my way. I also saw that it was now loaded with people. HEAD TO SHORE, DUMBASS, I texted back, but the launch kept chugging toward me. Great. Not only did Banks not follow instructions, he was also one of those lazy twits who shorthanded all his texts. What else should I have expected from a Big Three lawyer?

  I kicked up again to look at the WalWa skiffs; they had cranked up the speed, and a quick zoom showed their round, warty riot foam cannons were aiming in our direction. I swam at the launch until they were close enough to throw me a line. My shoulders burned as I hauled myself on board. The Breaches, all pale and pooped, gave me goggle-eyed stares as I climbed over them to the pilot house.

  “Do you not know how to follow instructions?” I said, shoving Banks away from the wheel. “I told you to head for shore, not to come back and get me.”

  “But it’s choppy out here, and–”

  “This? This is a calm day,” I said, spinning us about and putting the throttle to All Ahead Flee. “I could have swam all the way home if I’d wanted. You think I don’t know how to handle myself?”

  “No,” said Banks, “I just thought–”

  “Until you’ve had a solid meal, two beers and your pai’s firmware reburned, you don’t get to think,” I said, looking over my shoulder. The skiffs bounced over the waves, and would be within firing range in minutes. “You know why? ’Cause you don’t know shit about what goes on here. Everything you’ve learned about life went right out the window the minute you entered that can. You got me?”

  Banks blinked a few times, then said, “I do. Turn us around.”

  “Oh, so you’ve had a change of heart?” I said. “Can’t deal with someone who’s Union calling the shots?”

  “No,” said Banks, “it’s just that the only way out of here is to turn us around. We’re not as fast, but we’re more maneuverable, and by the time they come about–”

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t know what they taught you about naval warfare in law school, but I can assure you that it’s wrong. Those skiffs are all loaded down with enough riot foam to freeze us for a month, and they’ll be good and ready to fire as soon as we’re in range.”