Windswept (27 page)

“You got any skills?” she said, tapping a pencil on the side of her clipboard.

Plenty, I thought, but none that wouldn’t give me away as Union. “I, uh, do a little bit of everything,” I said.

She pointed her pencil toward the bottling line. “You can work quality control. Next!”

“What do I do?” I said.

She tilted her head to the side, and the look on her face said that she didn’t give a shit. “You make sure the quality is controlled,” she said. “Next!”

“I do a little bit of everything, too,” said Banks.

“You can go to the boilers,” she said.

“But I’d like to control quality,” said Banks.

“Me, too,” said Jilly.

The woman snorted. “You don’t get to ask what you do, dirtheads,” she said. “You do what I say, and I say you’re going to stir molasses in the boiler.”

Banks gave her the Grin, and the woman stared at him for a few moments before tapping her pencil on the clipboard. “Fine. Get to the line.”

Banks took Jilly by the shoulders and walked past. I looked at the woman, who just pointed at Banks with her pencil. “You want to get paid, you follow him and work,” she said, then looked down the line of people. “Next!”

I just nodded and hurried after Banks and Jilly. “Christ, I don’t know what they taught you about mind control in law school, but you are giving me lessons the minute we get out of here.”

“I just smiled at her,” said Banks. “You can get anywhere with WalWa people if you smile right.”

“WalWa?” I said. “What makes you say that?”

“Her eye,” said Banks. “Every Union person I’ve met, even Saarien, has this spark in their eye. Maybe it’s from having their pai reburned, maybe it’s because they don’t have to start every day singing the WalWa corporate anthem, I don’t know. But I
do
know that that woman’s eye is cold and dead, just like every other WalWa person I’ve met.” He shrugged. “That, and her tattoo looks like someone drew it on her face with a felt marker.”

I stole another glance at her face, and it hit me. “You’re right,” I said. “Her ink’s all wrong.” I pointed at the fist on my cheek. “No one’s allowed to get more than one of these unless they’ve done something meritorious as hell, and the last time that happened was twenty years ago when Marjo Arhanga won a raise in shipping rates by pounding the hell out of an armored WalWa business platoon barehanded.”

“She looked old enough,” said Banks.

“But not male enough,” I said. “Marjo was a man. That woman”–I pointed a thumb over my shoulder–“is wearing ink she hasn’t earned.”

As we walked toward the spouts, I stole glances at every inked face along the way, and all of them had overdone tattoo work. Here was a woman with perfect porcelain skin, yet she had the anchor marks on her cheeks that someone gets after twenty years of service on the open water. There was a kid, barely out of puberty, and he had ink commemorating street battles that ended when he was still a fetus. All of them had the same dull eyes that I’d seen for years when I was in Service, all of them held clipboards, and all of them were yelling at the people on the floor to work harder.

The line sounded like a riot at a percussion convention: two-hundred-liter drums rattled down a chute, stopped under a nozzle long enough to get filled with a liquid that smelled like molasses mixed with cleaning fluid, then scuttered away to get capped and stacked, all done by hand. The people working the line swayed, like they were about to fall asleep on their feet. One of the overinked supervisors, a tiny girl whose face was so tattooed it looked purple, walked up to a woman slamming lids onto the drums and smacked a her with her clipboard. “You want to sleep?” she yelled over the din. “You can sleep when you’re done filling those pallets!”

The woman nodded, then went back to working the capper. She waited until the clipboard woman walked away, then slumped over again, her shoulders bouncing for a bit before she straightened up and grabbed another drum lid from the stack. She turned, and it was Jordan Blanton.

I stared, my stomach doing backflips. I had to have been imagining it. But, no, it was Jordan, in the flesh, hammering lids onto molasses drums.

She wasn’t the only familiar face. There was Thor Becker. Nearby was Remy Galletain. All of Jordan’s supposedly dead crew were here, working the line. Good God, even Jimney Potts was there, pushing a broom. I had to have been hallucinating. My brain had now started falling apart. The Fear roared in triumph.

“I see them, too,” Banks said in my ear.

I swallowed, shook my head, and Jordan was still there, pounding down the lids. They were real. And so was the purple-faced girl, who saw me looking at her.

“You!” she shouted. “What are you standing here for?”

I shoved Banks into motion, but it was too late. She closed the distance in four quick steps.

“Well?” she yelled. She looked even younger up close, like she’d just been hatched out of a B-school. “What are you supposed to be doing?”

“We’re your new quality control,” Jilly yelled back.

The overinked girl glared at Jilly, then pointed at the rails. “Then get to work!” she screamed. “You want to get paid, you get to work!”

“You want to try smiling at her?” I yelled in Banks’s ear.

“Only if I can stay out of her reach,” he said as we bellied up to the line.

The Freeborn man to my side nodded and said, “Just make sure there’s nothing in the drums but molasses. You see anything floating, mark it with an X.” He held up a stick of chalk.

“How can you tell?” yelled Banks, peering into the drums; they held nothing but sweet-smelling murk. He knocked one, and something white floated to the surface, bobbling and turning.

It was a foot.

The Freeborn man made a giant X. “You can just tell,” he said. The blood rushed from Jilly’s face. Banks turned away and threw up.

I put a hand on Banks’s shoulder to help him keep his feet, and something hit me in the back of the head. I turned just in time to see a clipboard flying toward my nose. I saw stars for a second as the board whacked my face, but kept it together enough to swing back as hard as I could. I’d thrown better punches, but this one had the right speed and angle to connect with the purple-faced girl’s cheek. She yelped and bounced back into the line, knocking against the drums. Someone hit the emergency stop, and the racket came to a clattering halt.

“Let’s talk about your management style,” I said, shaking my hand to ease the sting. I looked at my fingers to make sure I hadn’t hurt anything; they were stained blue where I’d made contact.

The girl stood up, her flushed face looking like a bruised tomato. “You,” she said, holding her cheek and trying to keep from crying, “you are in
such
trouble.”

I held up my hand and showed her the smudged ink. “You and me both, kid.”

Her eyes went wide, and she put her hands over her face. “You... you... I’m getting the supervisor!” She ran up the line, all the workers applauding as she fled.

“Speaking of management skills,” said Banks, cleaning his mouth.

“What, should I have I smiled at her?” I said, wiping the ink off on my pants. “Let’s get gone.”

“Where?”

“Wherever this line goes,” I said, nodding at the stacks. “They wouldn’t be making all this without having a way to get it out.”

There was a commotion, and I turned to see the purple-faced girl pointing at me. Next to her was a man in an impeccable white suit. They both turned to us, and my jaw hit the ground when I saw Evanrute Saarien’s face grow as pale as his clothes. He shouted something, maybe my name, maybe an obscenity. I didn’t wait to find out.

I grabbed Banks and Jilly, and we ran, shouldering a half-filled drum off the line. The molasses spattered on the ground, leaving a sticky, toxic cloud in our wake as we ran as fast as we could into the stacks.

We turned corners at random until we couldn’t hear anyone following us. When I caught my breath, I looked up and saw nothing but molasses drums all the way to the ceiling, and the ceiling was a good fifty meters high. I tapped one of the drums next to me, and it thumped: full. “Jesus, there must be enough here for twenty years of fuel.”

“Or rum,” said Jilly.

“If it’s anywhere as nasty as what we smelled on the line, no one would want to drink it,” I said. “Besides, they don’t have the equipment.”

“They brought that dead guy back to life,” said Banks. “I think they can figure out distilling.”

“None of this makes sense!” I said. “I saw Saarien in the freezer!”

“When?” said Banks.

“Well, I saw Soni’s footage.”

“Footage can be faked.”

“Then how do you explain Jordan? Or Jimney? You were
there
,” I said. “You
saw
the bodies.”

“I saw a stack of limbs and torsos that were beaten to a pulp, and another body that was burnt to a crisp,” said Banks. “I didn’t see a single face.”

“But their pais and DNA tags identified them,” I said.

“Pais can be spoofed,” said Banks.

“But not genes,” I said. “At least, not here. There isn’t anyone with that kind of expertise or equipment. I mean, the skilled workforce we have barely keeps us in the Information Age. We have to scrounge or steal gear from ships in orbit. So I think if someone had figured out a way to copy bodies, news would have spread.”

“I think if someone stashed a million barrels of molasses, that would spread, too.”

I looked up at the endless stacks of drums. “What the hell is he doing with all this?”

“Well, what
can
he do with it?” said Banks. “You’re pretty sure he can’t make rum, so that leaves fuel. Why would he need this much? To flood the market?”

“A million barrels wouldn’t make a dent in the price,” I said. “There’s so much floating around Occupied Space that it would take half the tankers going down before things shifted.”

“How about locally?” said Banks. “Maybe he’s got something in mind for here.”

I shook my head. “That would only hurt the rank and file, and Saarien’s too much into the Struggle to do that.”

“But he has no problem messing with you.”

“That’s because I’m not pure enough,” I said, giving Banks a wry smile. “He wants to fight the bloated carcass of plutocracy, and I’m trying to get a seat at the table. No, he’s got new cane coming in, he’s refining it, and...”

I thought back to the stacks in that warehouse on the kampong, all the cane clean and green. “Jilly, all that contaminated cane we saw wouldn’t have even gotten into the transfer station, right?”

She nodded. “It would’ve been torched, and the field marked off for quarantine.”

“But everything Saarien was toting away was
perfect
,” I said. “We were in the middle of an infected field.”

“Maybe he got lucky,” said Banks.

“You heard what those Freeborn said: one little spot would show up on a stalk, and then the whole field would be done in a week,” I said. “Unless they used some kind of super fungicide, but that would be just as tough to make. There aren’t enough gengineers and chemists on the planet to do that kind of work. Everything in that warehouse, hell, this
place
should be covered with black stripe. How is it not?” I rubbed my temples and blinked up the time: six-thirty, on a Friday morning. I should have been in bed, not hiding under a zillion barrels of molasses. “How does all this shit fit together?”

“Does it have to?” said Banks. “I mean, it’s one thing to follow a thread, but it’s another to see if it’s woven together with others.”

“It’s all too weird not to be,” I said, touching the oil drum again, like if I petted it the right way, it would spill its secrets. Then, of course, I remembered that Madame Tonggow was a goddamn chemist. “I need to bring this stuff to someone, figure out what it is.”

“I am not helping you carry one of these,” said Banks.

“You won’t have to,” I said, taking the flask out of my pocket.

“You wouldn’t,” said Banks.

“I have to,” I said, unscrewing the cap and giving it a sniff. The Old Windswept smelled so good, and it would have tasted just as good, too, maybe even have a little metal tang from the flask’s interior. I gave it a slosh, wondered how much was in there, then I poured it out.

Banks sighed. “You could’ve offered me a bit, you know.”

“Or me,” said Jilly.

“Later, when you’ve developed a palate,” I said, shaking out the last of the rum. I got my multitool out of another pocket, opened the nastiest blade, and pierced one of the drums. Dark molasses seeped out, filling the air with its oily stink. I caught as much as I could in the flask, trying to keep it from getting on my fingers. “Let’s hope it’s not caustic,” I said, putting the flask into a cargo pocket on my thigh. I gave my hands a sniff: sweet, with a hint of rot and burning plastic. Even regular industrial molasses didn’t stink like this.

“You have any ideas how we’re going to get out of here?” said Banks.

“A few,” I said as we walked farther into the stacks, “but you probably won’t like them.”

“Is fire involved?”

“God, no,” I said. “Only an idiot would try to light this stuff up.” I rubbed my temples. “Where did this all come from? How could they shove this much gear in here?”

The entire floor shook, hard enough that all the drums rattled in their stacks. “You want to go back, look for Saarien and ask him?” said Banks.

“Not when we can find out what’s making that noise.”

“I’d much rather stay here,” said Banks. “It’s quieter. Probably safer.”

“Show some spine, Counselor,” I said. “Where’s your sense of intrigue?”

“Probably getting beaten up by your sense of self-preservation.”

As we walked further into the stacks, the boom grew louder. We rounded a corner just as a cargo can crashed to the floor, its doors flopping open. A line of men rolled drum after drum into the can, filling it up in minutes. I’d never seen that kind of manual labor done so quickly, but that probably had something to do with the dozens of goons surrounding the can, all of them cradling what looked like cattle prods. An inked man checked something off on his clipboard, swung the doors shut, then waved to the ceiling. A crane soared down and carried the can skyward, just in time for another can to tumble out of nowhere.