Like a Boss (12 page)

Odd looked at me, his eyes so clear and calm that it scared me. “Then what do we do when the Union screws us, Padma? An attack on one is an attack on all.”

I leaned over the table to put my face close to his. “Is that what Saarien’s telling you? That the Union, the group that’s protected us, is
attacking
us?”

“What else do you call it?” His smile faded. “You don’t think it’s a form of violence, what’s going on? People getting booted from their homes, getting left behind? That’s against the First Clause, as far as I’m concerned.”

“No, it’s exactly what Saarien used to do when he was still a Ward Chair,” I said. “Every chance he got, he would moan about how hard things were in Sou’s Reach, and that he needed extra funds to feed orphans and re-educate single fathers. And do you remember what he did with all that money?”

A woman cleared her throat behind me. “Is there a problem?”

I looked over my shoulder. Ly Huang stood there with two goonish-looking people. She wore a supernova fist pin, this one made from stainless steel. Her look grew harsher when she recognized me. “You have some nerve coming here, Padma.”

I turned around, keeping some space between my butt and the soup table. “Really.”

She nodded. “All this time, I thought you were a good boss. But now I know you’re just another parasite, sucking value and life away from me.”

“Ah. That’s why you walked off your job without telling Marolo or me?”

She spat on the ground. “My
job
was a joke. Pressing cane for pennies.”

“You made forty yuan an hour when other distillers pay twenty. You got a month of paid vacation, medical, dental, education grants, and a better pension than the Union pays.”

The two goons looked at each other. One of them, a woman with a shaved head, leaned over to Ly Huang and said, “Really? That’s a sweet deal.”

“It was garbage, is what it was,” said Ly Huang, her voice harsh. “It was wage slavery.”

“No, it was
work
.” I pointed at the tattoo on my cheek. “
This
was a hell of a lot closer to slavery than you or any other Freeborn will ever know.”

“And there it is,” said Ly Huang, fire in her eyes. “The superiority of the Breach comes out.”

“All right.” I stepped to Ly Huang and put my nose a few centimeters from hers. “You want to play Who’s More Morally Superior? Put on your big girl pants and get ready, kid, because I’ve been
winning
this game since before you were a fetus.” I cocked my head. “How are your parents, by the way? They’re still getting the remittances from your paycheck, right? The one that’s helped them buy a more efficient digester and those new PVs? Your mom wrote me a letter thanking me for your pay. She can get those lung meds again.”

Ly Huang spat. “You think you can buy my parents off? Bu wouldn’t
need
those meds if she hadn’t been breathing in smoke from slash-and-burns her whole life.”

I shook my head, my eyes locked on hers. “I like your mother a lot, but you can’t pin it on me or the Union if she worked
illegal
farms.”

“She did what she had to do! She had to keep us alive!”

“By not coming into the city? By not finding a better gig?”

“What better gig?”

I shrugged. “Maybe one working on a distillery? You know, like the one
you
have?”

The other goon, a man with scars on his forehead, leaned over Ly Huang’s shoulder and gave me a smile. “Excuse me. Do you have any openings?”

Ly Huang spun around and shot him a look so sharp it cut. The goon shrank back.

“Looks like you’ve got some pull around here,” I said to Ly Huang.

“What do you care? Exploiter.”

I kept my eyes from rolling. “If you want to call someone names, Ly Huang, it helps to use the right ones. I may be a lot of things, but I have never exploited you or any of your co-workers. I’m always a phone call away if you need to talk to me, but you haven’t said
boo
for the past year. If you and everyone else is scared the distillery’s going under, don’t be. You can come back to work right now, and we can let this all go.”

“Wait, more of you left?” said the goon with the shaved head.

I nodded. “I had a crew of twelve yesterday, but everyone’s walked off. You any good with tools?”

“Heck, yeah!” said the goon, her face brightening up. “I had a Class Two Mechanist’s rating!”

“What’s your name?”

She grinned. “Gwendolyn Barker.”

“I’m Kazys Ming!” said the other goon. “I’m really good with words.”

“I could always use marketing people.” I walked around Ly Huang and held out a hand. “Can you start today?”

“No, they can’t!” Ly Huang’s voice shifted, her tone that of an angry dog owner. The goons, their brains programmed to respond to command presence, shrank back. Oh, those poor bastards.

Ly Huang took a sharp breath, her face screwed up in rage. “My eyes have been opened to what you and every other Union stooge has done to all of us. You make promises, you seduce us with so-called ‘living wages,’ all to distract us from the fact that
we
are the true owners of this and every other world. You were exploited by the Big Three, and then you come here and exploit us. It’s in your nature, and you can never change.”

“I’m not a scorpion, and you’re not a frog,” I said. “Everyone has to work to make a living.”

She sneered as she shook her head. “That’s easy for you to say when you own the places we work. If you don’t make enough profit, you just close things down. People lose their jobs, they go hungry, they get desperate.”

“Or they go find some way to make a living. Are you trying to tell me that there aren’t enough jobs on this planet?”

“Only if you work the cane fields,” said Ly Huang. “If you want to spend your life cutting and stacking, sure. But if you want something better, you have to fight for it. That’s what Reverend Saarien is showing us: how to fight.”

“
Reverend
?”

She nodded. “He’s been ordained in the eyes of the universe. He knows the way to liberation, and he’s going to teach us. We are history’s select. What we will start today is going to spread to Occupied Space until everyone is truly free!” She looked at the goons. “You keep her here. I have work to do.”

The two goons gave each other pained looks. “Do we have to?”

“YES.”

Ly Huang barked the word so loud it made all of us shake. The goons nodded, then swooped to me before I could move. They formed a human wall and pushed me into the table so hard it hit the wall. Hot soup spilled on the floor and splashed through my trousers. The goons’ massive bulk blocked out any forward escape. Both of them stared down at me, their faces turned to stone masks, though the one with the scars gave me a brief look that said,
Sorry, it’s corporate programming. What can I do?

“Ly Huang,” I called over the wall of goons. “I know Saarien’s talking about a cane strike. You know that’s going to screw things up for a whole lot of people, right?”

I could hear Ly Huang clear her throat. “When anything happens to disturb profits, what do the capitalists do? They go on strike, don’t they? They withdraw their finances from that particular mill. They close it down because there are no profits to be made there. They don’t care what becomes of the working class. But the working class, on the other hand, has always been taught to take care of the capitalist’s interest in the property.”

I ground my teeth. “Ly Huang, you may have had a tough life on the kampong, but you do not get to quote Big Bill Haywood back at me. Not until you’ve gone through half the shit
I
did to make sure that people like you could get things like schools, money, and healthcare.”

She laughed. “Oh, right. I forgot. You and all the other big Union heroes got your heads caved in when you squared off against the Big Three. You did your marches, sang your songs, inked your faces to show everyone what you did to protect the workers of Occupied Space.”

“Just because you weren’t there doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” I said.

“None of that has made my life better. It hasn’t made my mom’s lungs any better. It hasn’t kept people from begging in the streets for scraps.”

“And if you start this strike, it’s going to get worse. Please trust me on this.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because I’ve been through two strikes, and Saarien hasn’t. He stayed holed up in Sou’s Reach. Once you start a strike, things get ugly fast. The food’s going to run out, and then the rum’s going to run out, and then everyone will be at each other’s throats. There’s still time to talk and cool things down.”

I heard quick steps as Ly Huang walked back. She climbed onto the goons’ backs and looked down at me. “Actually, the word went out ten minutes ago. The bit about raising our fists? That was the signal. Strike Committees everywhere are seizing control and telling the people the truth. Your Union has failed again, and, when we’re done and get what we want, you’re going to wish you’d turned things over to us earlier.” She hopped off the goons and left.

A few moments later, Odd poked his head around the male goon’s biceps. “You sure you don’t want soup?”

I struggled against the goons, but they held their ground, which held me in place. “Odd, can you help me? Can you get your… friends to let me go?”

“Sorry, Padma, but I never studied Command Presence.” His eyes unfocused for a moment. “Hey, did you go to B-School? Didn’t you study it?”

“Yes, but I can’t really do it when I’m being crushed!”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s probably tough.” Odd sat down on the table and picked up a bowl of soup. He knocked his spoon around for a moment. “She is right, you know.”

I stopped wriggling. “What?”

Odd nodded to himself as he spooned soup and watched it fall back into the bowl. “You are an exploiter. Not that you’re a bad person! But you do use people. And you’re not really nice about it.”

I jumped at him, but the goons pushed back. My ass had now fallen asleep from getting shoved into the table’s edge.

Odd held out his hands. “Plus you’re really thin-skinned.”

I gave one more shove against the goons. “You really think that?”

“Yep.” Odd put the soup down and got up. “When I worked at the plant, I saw how you’d blow people off. They’d come to you for help, and you’d tell them you were busy but that you’d look into their problems. You never did. Everyone talked about it. People were glad when you took Bloombeck’s old Slot. Said you deserved it.”

The Fear chuckled. I kept my mouth shut.

“Now, I didn’t agree with that,” said Odd.

“You just said I was an exploiter.”

“Oh, I’m on board with that. But the part about working Bloombeck’s Slot? I respected you for that. Felt to me like you were doing penance. I’ve tried telling that to the others, but they just said it was high time you wallowed in shit like the rest of us.”

“Real short-term memories there.”

“I know, right?” Odd laughed. “And
I’m
the one with the neuron damage!”

I sighed. “For what it’s worth, Odd, they’re right. I did blow off people. I was so close to getting my payout, I lost track of my job. But that doesn’t excuse what’s about to happen.”

“I think it’s already happened, right?”

“Work with me, Odd. There is always time to get everyone talking. If the cane stops, so does the money. The money stops, it’s going to get bad fast.”

Odd pursed his lips. “Okay. I think you’re right. Let’s get you out of there.”

I struggled against the goons. “I still can’t get enough breath.”

He nodded. “That’s gonna be a problem. I was always impressed with the way you could change your voice when you were talking to goons. I remember that one time at Big Lily’s how you did the Command Presence thing on this one guy, and he had to stand on one foot for an hour. That was funny. Kinda cruel, but funny.”

The two goons stirred. Their eyes flicked toward each other. “Is that true?” rumbled Gwendolyn. Oh, shit, had they learned how to break their programming? Or were they just pissed off? They both pressed in closer. One of them poked me in the diaphragm.

I gasped and nodded.

Gwendolyn stepped back enough to allow my lungs to reinflate. I fell to my knees, gasping. She took a knee and put her face in front of mine. “You know, we can’t help how we are. All us goons. The Big Three modify our bodies when we go into Security Services. They change the cell structures of our muscles and bones, and we can’t shrink back. My bones are so dense I need to eat coral just for the calcium. Did you know that?”

My head spun. “I did not.”

“We need supplements that can’t be made here,” she said. “We have to scrounge to find what we need just to stay healthy, and the Temple provides that.”

The other goon, Kazys, crouched down next to his partner. “We’re not mindless, you know. I write monologues. About humanity’s relationship with nature. I was going to perform tonight at the Novice Theater Group, but I had to come here to work.”

“That was you?”

He perked up. “You heard of me?”

“I heard you’re
good
,” I gasped.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“My point,” said Gwendolyn, “is that we were supposed to be welcomed as members of the Union, but we’re not. We’re thought of as less than human, as these mindless machines that respond to people’s voices.” She touched my ink. “I’m sure the Big Three hurt you somehow. I can promise they hurt us, too. It would be nice if someone acknowledged that.”

I looked at these two people and thought of the times I’ve faced off with lines of WalWa goons. They wore armor that made them look like metal rhinos, all sliding plates and sharp points. They didn’t need weapons; one punch would be enough to break ribs and burst organs. Every time some former goon would come into Brushhead looking for work, I would always send them to the shipbreaking yards or the heavy industrial parts of town. I had no need for brute force in my plant.

I nodded. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I certainly did not think you or anyone like you were capable of getting hurt. That was wrong of me.”

Gwendolyn. “I accept your apology.”