Like a Boss (9 page)

Letty shook her head. “You really gonna give me shit because I’ve never had needles jab my face?”

“Maybe a little.”

“You know, the fanatics in the Freeborn Organizing Committee thought that was a sure sign of dehumanization. Getting stamped like cattle.”

“Do you?”

She snorted. “I always thought the FOC were loons. And worthless, too. All that babbling about changing the world, and all they did was blow up a post office and make the rest of us look like terrorists. No, I’m Union, Padma. I know the weird balance we have with the Big Three. We may depend on their cash, but they don’t directly control us. If some mid-level director in Thronehill issues a memo saying everyone has to start buying twice as much Tasty Choice Caffeine Lubricant, we don’t have to follow along.”

“Especially since Tasty Choice tastes like crap.”

“
Exactly
.” Letty let a smile slip. “I know our relationship with the Big Three isn’t perfect, but it means we get to live our lives.”

“Except when it doesn’t.”

She sighed. “And now is one of those times.”

“Why hasn’t WalWa certified the cane for export, Letty?”

“Because that magical pool of labor that allows us to grow cane by hand is vanishing. WalWa knows it. People are leaving the kampong, and the fields are going fallow. That’s why I need your help.”

“To do what?”

“To stop Evanrute Saarien.”

“No.”

I said it before my brain could scream
Wait until you hear the terms!
I reminded my brain there were no terms in the world big enough to deal with him ever again–

“I’ll forgive your debt.”

My brain said
Oh, yeah?,
and I leaned forward. “I beg your pardon?”

Letty spread her hands on her lap, as if she were laying out a complicated hand of cards. “You are on the hook for blowing up the lifter. You will be in debt for the rest of your life, and the only position open to you is one where you put on a leaky environment suit and wade through filth for ten hours a day. Do you really want to do that for the next eighty years?”

I shrugged, trying to stay cool. The first rule of negotiation was to be able to walk away at any time, no matter how incredibly good the deal was. “I could always get another job.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Madame President, are you threatening to infringe on my right to be professionally mobile?”

Letty smiled. “I’ve always thought that threats happen before the action. Once the action’s been taken, words don’t matter as much.”

I let my head bob just a tiny bit, enough to acknowledge:
touch
é
. “Well, there’s always the possibility that Old Windswept becomes the hot ticket item among the Body Corporate. I’ve been sending samples to Thronehill and getting some orders.”

She laughed. “Your rum may be good, but I doubt it’s one-trillion-yuan good.”

“Buy a case. You can find out for yourself.”

“I could buy a million cases, and you’d still be in debt for what you did.”

“What I did saved Occupied Space’s population from getting thrown back into the Stone Age.”

Letty rolled her eyes. “Please. Late Information Age at the worst.”

“Cancer would still have gone back to being fatal. Same difference.”

A flash of anger broke through Letty’s calm facade. “Are you really that proud? You’d rather spend the rest of your life in the bottom of the plant than do this for me?”

“You want to strong-arm Saarien?” I went to the door and flung it open. The woman with the perfect skin spun around, her hands up and ready to hit. I pointed at her. “Get her to go down to his crappy little church. Have
her
break his thumbs. I don’t do anyone’s dirty work, no matter what they’re offering.”

Letty sighed. She picked up the jammer and fiddled with it as she peeled herself off the chair. “I really like this piece,” she said, nodding to the chair.

“Yours isn’t comfy enough?”

She shrugged. “Every time I’m in my chair, people yell at me to make their lives better. Gets unpleasant after a while.”

“Then you should try another gig. I know one in the plant that can be filled immediately. You’d be great at it, seeing how well you shovel shit.”

Letty didn’t look at me as she breezed past. “That church isn’t the only one that Saarien has. You think a man as ambitious as Evanrute Saarien would limit himself to Hawks Street?” She shook her head, her smile growing bigger and meaner.

“So he’s franchising.”

Letty stopped at the threshold. When she turned to look at me, the smile she had made me think of every trophy fisherman I’d seen when they’d hooked a big one. Sweet Working Christ, this woman was
good
at pushing buttons. If I weren’t so pissed at her, I would have asked for her to teach a master class at manipulation. “Ask around. You think you’re the only employer losing people?” She shrugged.

I shrugged back. “There’s nothing in the Charter stopping him.”

“No, but what he’s doing is going to tear the Charter into tiny, tiny pieces,” she said. “You were there. You heard his sermon.”

“I heard
part
of it.”

“You heard the bit about the strike.”

“How do you know?”

She pursed her lips, and her eyes flicked away. She clenched the jammer. I tensed. “Are you… are you hacking into my feed?”

She said nothing.

I shook my head. “Well, I never thought I’d see the day when the Prez herself became Big Brother.” I pointed out into the hall. “You’d better hope that jammer works, or I will bring you down so fast you’ll get the bends.”

Letty’s smile was gone now. “Padma, I’m asking you to do this because you are the perfect candidate for this gig. You’re stuck in the worst job in Brushhead, and you have a history with him. He’s acting contrite as hell, so he might be willing to bring you in.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To prove he’s changed. I don’t know what’s motivating him to start this strike, but I can see that he’s going after it with the same fervor he had when he was in the Union. He only got out three months ago, and he’s already got eight hundred people following him. It’s just a matter of time before he’s back to his old tricks.”

“Then talk to the Parole Committee,” I said. “If you can screw up my life so easily, putting him back in prison should be a cinch.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “I can’t override that decision. Checks and balances.”

“Oh, so you can violate my buffers, keep me in my job, and break into my home, but you can’t do anything to him? You need to find some better checks.”

“
Or
you could take me up on my offer.” She tapped on the doorframe. “I know you pay a ridiculously low rent for this place. I’m pretty sure if your landlady filed a complaint with the Housing Committee that she’d be able to charge market rates.”

I ground my teeth. “I think it’s really cute how you’re being so tough with me but you couldn’t have been like that with Saarien. Did I say ‘cute’? I meant ‘go fuck yourself.’”

Letty’s bodyguard took a step toward me. Letty just turned her head, and the bodyguard froze, her fist raised to her chest. “There’s no need for violence,” said Letty. “We’re all going to use our words.”

“I just did,” I said. “I can use them again. Go fuck yourself, Letty.”

She smiled and turned to her bodyguard. “See, this is why it’s a good thing she’s Union and not still with the Big Three. She doesn’t let up, even when she knows she’s wrong. A steel will, this one has.” She looked back at me. “The Union will forgive your debt in its entirety if you can stop Saarien from starting his strike. I don’t care how you do it, as long as it doesn’t end up with him in the hospital or dead.”

I snorted. “You’ve got muscle, and you’re afraid to use it? Maybe you’re not cut out for office after all.”

She shook her head. “Muscle is just another tool in the box. I don’t want to break Saarien. I just want him stopped. I want any talk of a strike stopped.”

“So we can’t even use our words now?”

“A word like ‘strike’ can hurt a whole lot of people,” she said. “It starts out as a whisper. Then it turns into talk. Then it’s shouted by people throwing rocks. If there’s no cane harvested, we don’t get money. We don’t get money, people start to starve. And then it gets
really
ugly.”

“Then maybe you can loosen up the purse strings.”

“You think I don’t want to?” The smile faded, and Letty held up her hands, like she wanted to grab my shirt front. “You know how many times I’ve gone over our budget, Padma? Should I cancel preschool or elder care? Should I shut down the court system or food distribution?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Is it that bad?”

“You think I’d be doing this if it were good? Padma, I am
begging
you to help me. Just a week of work, and I’ll cancel the debt.”

“Turn off the jammer and say that again.”

Letty shook her hand. “I can’t let anyone else know about this.”

I shrugged. “Then I can’t take this deal.” I closed the door.

“Wait!” Letty shoved her boot in the doorway.

I sighed and opened up. “How do I know you’ll follow through on your part of the bargain? I don’t work for handshakes. You put something on the Public or it’s no go.”

“If I talk about this, it’s going to backfire,” said Letty. “If Saarien thinks you’re working for me, then you won’t get far. And if anyone else on the Executive Council knows, they won’t let me forgive the debt.” She grabbed my arm. “I
need
you, Padma. This planet, this Union, we
all
need you.” Her look softened. “Can’t the Sky Queen of Justice help?”

I rolled my eyes. “I should say no just for you invoking that song.”

“But you’ll do it?”

I took in a breath. On the one hand, I didn’t like the idea of sneaking around and doing Letty’s dirty work. I never had, especially when I was a Ward Chair. She liked cutting all sorts of behind-the-back deals that usually messed with my headcount or funding. And the fact that she’d let Saarien walk all over us made me want to reject her on principle.

On the other hand, I had a trillion-yuan debt to pay. I didn’t plan on having kids, but I could see Letty having me cloned so my duplicates would have to work it off.

I gave her a very slow nod. “Okay. Say I agree to this. What guarantee do I have that you’ll follow through?”

“You’ll just have to trust me.”

“You broke into my
house
, Letty. I’d say trust is in short supply.”

She scratched her neck. “Okay. I’ll remove fifty thousand from your debt. Right now.”

“I thought you said there wasn’t any money.”

Letty shrugged. “There’s money, and there’s discretionary funds. I’ve been saving for emergencies. I can move numbers around, and fifty K are gone from your total. I know it’s not much, and it’ll take a week or so to clear, but I hope you’ll take it as a sign of my sincerity.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to. You just have to do the job.” Letty held out her hand.

And, like a fool, I shook it.

My first boss when I joined the Union was a foul-mouthed former data analyst for MacDonald Heavy named Hieu Vanavutu. The day I signed up to be an organizer, he sat me down and told me that the only thing that mattered in this job was planning. Forget all that bullshit about issues and personal leverage and knowing who was having sex with whom. A good plan of attack could make or break a labor action. And that meant sifting through data until your eyes hurt and your brain demanded alcohol and sex.

So, I sat back in my overstuffed chair (after I gave it a quick wipe-down; God only knew what horrible political diseases Letty had brought in with her) and poked around on the Public for any mention of Saarien’s churches. Well, first I blinked up my debt balance. Sure enough, a pending credit for fifty thousand yuan had appeared. Granted, she could revoke it if I pissed her off, but, for now, Letty had followed through. That meant I had to do the same.

What I found made my guts shrivel. In the past three months, Saarien had set up twenty-two churches. Most were scattered around the city, with one lone outpost in the kampong. He had certainly been busy since his release. Now I had to figure out who he was pulling back into his orbit.

I blinked up who had been inside the churches, just to see how many Union people had fallen under his spell. A few hundred, it turned out. They came from all kinds of jobs: a few doctors, some engineers, a lot of mid-level hands-on types. There was no pattern that I could make out right away, but there were a dozen people whom I had met face-to-face. That would be as good a place to start as any. If I had to stop Saarien, that would mean doing good old fashioned organizing work, and that meant bullshit sessions and beers. I would have to see how far Saarien’s influence had reached out to the wider community. I would have to find out how many people were that upset with the way the Union was acting. And I’d have to make sure I had enough cash available if I went to a Freeborn-run bar.

The sun had set when I stepped out of my building onto Samarkand Road. I had split so much time between the plant and the distillery that I hadn’t been able to enjoy my neighborhood at the end of the day, my favorite time. Most of the workers had clocked out, and the swing shift was wrapping up their dinners. That meant the air was alive with a symphony of smells: kimchi and fufu and tri-tip, grilling and baking and steaming, vinegar and sugar and fire. The thrum of cane diesel motors from tuk-tuks and lorries bounced off the row houses, their rumbling accompanied by the ringing of thousands of bicycle bells and the calls to prayer at the Emerald Masjid and Our Lady Of The Big Shoulders Cathedral. Brushhead was a mess, and Santee was a bigger mess, and I loved every inch of it. I loved the chaos. I loved the attempts at order. I loved living here, and I was pissed that it would take dealing with Evanrute Saarien again to keep this place going.

Unless he was right. Was he right? There was no way that dicktree was right.

Aw, dammit, I had to see if he was right.

I blinked my pai into hidden mode as I walked down Samarkand to Koothrapalli Avenue, Brushhead’s main drag. I could have called Sirikit to take me around, but I had to move under my own power tonight. I grabbed a bike from a share rack and hopped into traffic. I hadn’t had a chance to do this in sixteen months, just ride and take in everything zipping past me. The neighborhood sat in a sweet spot for me: lively enough that it didn’t feel like the sterile graveyard that was Thronehill, but slow enough that I didn’t get dizzy keeping up with the crowds.