Like a Boss (8 page)

And there I sat: bottle, candle, the dancing flame. My little room, now bathed in the warm glow. Me, sitting in this chair, at this table, in this flat, in this neighborhood, in this city, on this planet, in this system, in this cluster, in this galaxy, in this universe. I let myself drift outside my tiny frame of reference, let my mind float farther and farther back until I was lost in the great sea of stars. I had no idea how many of them were full of life or strife, how many were being born or dying. I knew I had a place somewhere in all of that, and I had a short span to make it count. I had this time, this place, and this one sip of Old Windswept.

I unscrewed the bottlecap and took that tiny sip. The warm line of rum ran down my throat into my belly, and I imagined that heat shooting up my spine into my brain. All those spots that got screwed up by my transit, all those neurons fried by the hibernant or business school or bad luck, none of that mattered for this moment. Here and now, I was whole and healthy, and fuck you, The Fear.

“That looked delicious.”

I jumped out of my chair. Rum sloshed out of the bottle as I held it in front of me. A woman sat in my overstuffed chair, her hands on the armrests. I did a quick look behind me to make sure no one else was hiding in my flat. I moved to the nearest curtain and threw it open. When I saw who was in the chair, the bottle dropped, along with my jaw.

Leticia Arbusto Smythe, the President of the Santee Anchorage Chapter of the Universal Freelancers’ Union, gave me a polite smile, her un-inked cheeks glowing. She uncrossed her legs, her cargo trousers rustling and clinking. She had her electric green hair tied up, a sign that this was a business call. That still didn’t stop me from saying, “What the fuck are you doing in my flat, Letty?”

She reached into her jacket and produced a cigar. “Your landlady let me in.”

“I’ll have to file a complaint with the Housing Committee, then. No one’s supposed to come in here without my say-so.”

Letty shrugged as she fiddled with a matchbox.

“Or smoke.”

She glared at me. I shrugged. “It’s in the lease.”

Letty
hmm
ed, then tucked the cigar back in her jacket. She nodded at the bottle on the floor. “You gonna waste that?”

I looked down. Old Windswept came in triangular bottles of sea-green glass. This one was open. Once upon a time, I would have dived for the floor to keep any of the rum from spilling, but I had learned that, once you owned your own distillery, that kind of thing just wasn’t
done
. I picked up the bottle and put it away.

“Not even a finger for the Prez?” said Letty from her chair.
My
chair.

“I’m always happy to serve my guests,” I said, closing the cabinet. “My
invited
guests.”

She laughed. “Oh, come
on
, Padma. You still owe me a drink.”

“Since when?”

“Since that night you dragged me to karaoke.”

“First of all, that was nine years ago. Second,
you
dragged
me
to that crappy little bar. And third, you didn’t even
sing
.”

She shrugged. “I don’t like the way my voice sounds.”

“You give weekly speeches on the Public.”

“That’s
speaking
. Singing is another beast. Besides, this was the only way we could talk without all the eyes and ears of the world watching us.”

I tapped my temple. “We both have video cameras in our heads.”

“But they don’t work when I have this.” She held up the matchbox.

I blinked back my pai’s buffer and got static. I put my hands on my hips. “Letty, are you jamming me? In my own home?”

“I am indeed.” She pocketed the jammer. “Because the Union needs you, Padma, but no one can know about it.”

I walked to the door. “Thank you for visiting, I’ll be sure to take this into consideration come election time.” With a flourish, I opened the door and bowed low. “Now go home.”

A woman in a deck jacket and work boots swung around from the door posts. Before I could react, she got between me and the door. I didn’t even have time to yell as she closed the door with a solid click. She put her back to the door and faced me, and I had the damnedest feeling of déjà vu.

The woman looked my age, though her skin was so smooth that there was no way she’d spent any time in the sun. She had a LiaoCon Security Services tattoo on her cheek: a deep green dagger with a red merlion coiled around the blade. The inklines were crisp, like she’d only gotten it a month ago. She squared her shoulders at me, and her eyes said she would break me in half if I made a wrong move. There was no way she was a rookie.

I threw up my hands. “This is some shameful shit, Letty. Breaking into my place, having your little thug keeping me from bouncing your ass on the street. You really want me to go to everyone else on the Executive Committee? Don’t you think Ly An Nogales would love to hear about you getting all power-grabby?”

Letty tented her fingers and rested her elbows on her knees. She looked like an illustration from one of my B-school manuals about executive poise. “I think Ly An would do the same if she faced the same situation.”

“Which is what?”

She smiled. “Pour me a drink, and I’ll tell you.”

I jerked a thumb at the woman guarding my door. “Tell your attack poodle to wait outside. She doesn’t look housetrained.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. She made a sound like a jet engine starting up as she uncrossed her arms.

“No, it’s okay,” said Letty, holding up a hand. “Thank you, Jennifer. Please wait outside.”

Jennifer’s upper lip twitched into a microsneer as she slipped out the door. I threw the deadbolt. “Where did you find
her
?”

“Same place I find everyone else who’s useful: a bar.”

I got a bottle of Beaulieu’s Blend out for Letty. Endless supply of Old Windswept aside, I wasn’t about to share my best with her, not after this crap. “Well, she certainly has a great tableside manner.”

Letty moved over to my little table and blew out the candle. “She just came down the cable earlier this year. Interesting story: she was in personal security for some ag executive, and her boss wanted her to go out and rough up some tenant farmers. She punched out her boss, freaked out, and stowed away on the first outbound ship she could find.” She shook her head. “Four years later, she slips down the cable, and Little Charlemagne put her to work as a bouncer.”

I put the bottle and two glasses on the table. “Is that why his place started getting good reviews? I know it wasn’t for his food. He burns water.”

“She certainly changed the ambiance,” said Letty, eyeing the two fingers I poured in her glass. “Once she rousted out the troublemakers and bullies, it became a more pleasant place to hang out.”

“Yeah, but pity wherever the troublemakers and bullies landed.” I held up my glass, and we clinked them. “To personal security; would that we all could have some.”

Letty snorted and took a deep sip. I just mouthed my rum; it was too close to Six O’Clock to put other forms of alcohol into my system.

She held the glass up to the evening light and swirled the rum. “You know, Padma, whenever the Executive Committee is kibitzing amongst ourselves, this comes up a lot. You and this hour of the day. Back when we were both Ward Chairs, I remember you kicking up a fuss because Ted Fantodji wanted to have a meeting at six. It almost came to blows.”

I shrugged. “It just wasn’t a good time.” I was glad the jammer was there; it saved me the embarrassment of reviewing the memory, filed away on the Public for all to see.

“But it’s
never
been a good time.” She tapped her temple. “I checked. You are always
here
at six o’clock, but for a few occasions like hurricanes and dealing with Ghosts.” She took another sip. “Why the ritual, Padma?”

I made myself laugh. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Letty put down her glass. “My mom was a canon. I grew up surrounded by bread and wine and all the stuff that transforms it. I
know
ritual when I see it, Padma.”

“Is that why you came here? You got a bet with the rest of the Executive Committee about how I spend my time? Joke’s on you; I’ve actually been running a pit fighting ring.”

She tapped the glass. “That’s why I like you. Even when you’re neck-deep in bullshit, you make with the funny.”

I poured her another finger. “Madame President, why did you break into my home?”

“Because I have something that needs fixing, and you’re the only one who can fix it.”

Now I laughed for real. “If I had a hundred yuan for every time someone’s used that line on me, I could buy
two
distilleries.”

Letty shot the rum and hissed in a breath. When she exhaled, she leveled her eyes and said, “Evanrute Saarien is going to destroy the world.”

I took her glass and mine and brought them back into the kitchen. Deep in my gut, I could feel the acid roiling. There were only so many times you got to speak truth to power, and I had to make sure my next words were cool and clear. As much as I wanted to yell at her, I had to keep myself together.

I placed my hands on either side of the sink and leaned down, as if the cool of the glass tile could keep me from boiling over. “Evanrute Saarien got that way because
you
let him.”

Letty shook as if I’d slapped her. “
What
?”

I kept pushing down on the counter, willing the tiles to snap under my weight. “I warned you and everyone else up and down the food chain that Saarien was, at best, full of shit whenever he talked about The Struggle.” Letty quirked her mouth; anyone who’d been around Saarien had gotten their fill of his rhetoric. “You had every opportunity to stop him, to cut his funding, to get him tossed from Sou’s Reach. I told you and I told you and you
never listened to me
.”

I pushed back from the counter. “It took him trying to burn me and Wash and Banks alive before you all realized that you’d created a monster. He was ready to destroy
billions
of people, including our Union brethren
right here
, and you
let him happen
. Why in hell should I do anything to help
you
when you wouldn’t listen to me when we could have done something?” I shook my head. “He’s out of jail forty-eight years early and starting his empire of bullshit all over again. What the
hell
, Letty?”

To her credit, Letty didn’t interrupt. She didn’t flinch. She held her hands in her lap, calm and collected. When I’d blown myself out, she gave me a nod, like she was asking if she could have the floor. I held out a hand:
by all means
. She looked me in the eye and said, “You are absolutely right. About everything.”

I blinked. “Now I wish you didn’t have that jammer.”

“I’ll be happy to say that again on the Public when this is all over.” She put the matchbox on the table. “You were at his church this afternoon. What did you see?”

I told her about the food and clothes, about the busted people sitting around. “He’s right, isn’t he? About the people slipping through the cracks.”

Letty nodded. “We’ve had a breakdown in social services over the past nine months.”

“How?”

“Because there is no longer enough money to convince everyone to keep working,” said Letty. “We need two point eight million yuan to keep everyone paid for a week, bennies and all. Right now we’re getting nothing.”

“Why?”

“Because of Vytai Bloombeck’s black stripe.”

I blanched out of reflex. Bloombeck had been a constant pain in my ass ever since I came to Santee Anchorage. When I was a fresh Breach, the only place I could afford was a shared hutong flat with Bloombeck and five others. He was always wheedling us to go in on his small-time scams: pretending to get in tuk-tuk accidents, renting out neighbors’ laundry, rolling drunks for pocket money. His biggest con turned out to be his last one: in return for helping him buy a plot of land, he sold me the name of a ship with people who wanted to Breach, and they all turned out to be a Ghost Squad. Then Bloombeck turned out to be a genius-level gengineer with a grudge as big as his stench. I often wondered what the last year and a half would have been like if the Ghosts hadn’t killed him. He’d probably still make my pai freak out and jab me in the eye. “What about it?”

“After the black stripe infected our cane, we had to torch a quarter of our fields to make sure it didn’t spread. The Big Three weren’t happy about that.”

“Who cares what they think?”

“We do, because they have since decided we aren’t a reliable supplier.”

“We make enough for four other worlds. And that’s in an off year.”

“We do, but we don’t get paid like we used to.”

“But the Contract–”

“– got negated when the black stripe ripped through our fields.” Letty ground her teeth. “Those rates and goods we got from the Big Three were dependent on us raising healthy cane. We fought to make sure that we didn’t have to rely on Big Three pesticides or herbicides, that we could grow cane
our
way. It’s labor intensive, but we have plenty of labor to draw from. When Bloombeck’s black stripe got out, we voided our part of the Contract. The Big Three cut us off, and rightly so.”

I glowered. “I never thought I’d hear you take the Big Three’s side.”

Letty made me a face. “Spare me the purity bullshit. We need the Big Three’s tech and their money to live the way we want. Or do you want us driven back to the Steam Age? You know what kinds of horrible diseases people died from then? Remember when cancer was still fatal?”

“No.”

“No, because we live in a time and place where medicine has eradicated all that.” She straightened up in her chair. “You and I and everyone on this planet will live a good long time, provided we don’t starve. People need to eat, and we need to pay people to grow food, and that money comes from the Big Three because it’s the only currency they’ll accept. And we get that money by selling our cane, which we are not providing enough of. It’s circular and ugly, but it’s the system we have, and it means none of us are Indentured to the Big Three anymore.”

I touched the ink on my cheek. “Us?”