Blackfish City(59)
“So I keep hearing,” Masaaraq said sourly.
“Let’s brainstorm!” Soq said. “Bounce ideas off each other. Share crazy thoughts.”
Masaaraq laughed. “My best idea is plenty crazy already. I was going to knock the goddamn door down and march in there with a polar bear and kill everyone who got in my way.”
“That’s a good start,” Soq said. “But they’ll have doors not even Liam here could knock down.”
“His name is not Liam. That’s an idiotic name for a polar bear.”
“You’ll need help. Software, maybe, a way to reroute control of the security systems. People who work there, who you can buy off or threaten or blackmail into helping you out.”
“I’ve thought of this,” Masaaraq said, but she did not seem quite so contemptuous of what Soq might have to offer. “Some of it, anyway. Keep . . . brainstorming. I have to leave.”
“Leave?” Soq said, laughing. “What, you have a haircut appointment?”
“We’ll talk tomorrow. You and me and Kaev. And, what’s her name? Go.”
“Are they my family, too? Whoever’s in there?”
Masaaraq stalked off to the far edge of the boat. While Soq watched, she began to move through a complex series of weapon routines. Soq tried to focus on the important business of rubbing Liam’s belly but couldn’t keep their eyes off the orcamancer’s hypnotic forms. A black shape against the city’s lights, swinging and leaping and spinning. Unstoppable. Unresting. Unyielding. Forever fighting a line of invisible enemies.
Ankit
Ankit went to see the boat people like it was just another workday. Cambodian refugees, hundreds of them, living in single-room shacks on floating flats towed from Tonle Sap when rising seas flooded that freshwater lake and forced the people who made their living fishing it to flee. A dense population pocket; prime get-out-the-vote fodder. When Ankit arrived, children were waiting in the doorway, their faces every bit as full of hope and fear as they’d been in the famous photographs of lake-top life before and during the exodus.
She liked the houseboats. Inside, it could still be Cambodia. Still be a hundred years ago. They had their own little village, all of them tied to one crude pier. Their own little school; their own little gas station. A girl sold scratch-off lottery tickets out the window of one. Some still kept crocodiles or hogs in tiny cages heated by illegal off-red geothermal extension pipes. By and large they were uninterested in outsiders, aloof from politics, but a small cluster of them voted.
Her pockets were full of candy. The wrappers sported Fyodorovna’s name and face. She never failed to feel gross giving them out to kids, but then again it never failed to make the kids happy. A little girl gave her a lump of wood, brightly painted. Seeing Ankit’s quizzical expression, the mother pointed to a pile of carved water buffalo. Bright brown; cashew nut tree wood. Ankit smiled; there was something comforting about the consistency of human hunger, human wickedness, that the wood trade would continue even as the total number of trees in the world slid down the parabola toward zero. The lump smelled like sap. “A mistake,” the mother said, and Ankit’s screen translated. “It broke.” Ankit pocketed her mistake, bowed, and departed.
She sent Fyodorovna a photo, reported that the visit was a smash success. Leaving Arm Seven, heading out onto Arm Five, she felt like a kid playing hooky from school.
And, just as she had when she played hooky from school, she was scared out of her mind and had no idea what she was doing. Back then she’d been heading for submarine arcades, clubs for underage scalers, and now she was standing in front of a boat that served as crime syndicate headquarters, where bad things almost certainly happened on a daily basis.
Unlike the immaculately crafted campaign plans she constructed for her boss, her present plan was flimsy, slapped together out of a couple of measly observations.
First, that all four of the illegal construction sites hit by violent attacks were owned by the same syndicate—Amonrattanakosin Group. Formerly a legitimate enterprise of the illegitimate Thai military government, friends of a general who got handed inflated contracts for provisions vending during the grid city construction boom. Currently headed by a Thai-Malaysian second-generation Qaanaaqian known only as Go. Headquartered on a boat on Arm Five. Which Ankit now stood before, utterly without a plan.
Second, that she was certain she knew who Go’s unknown nemesis was, in this war that had sprung up overnight, because it followed immediately upon the very public execution of Martin Podlove’s grandson, in a film clip seen hundreds of thousands of times, with Podlove himself wailing and pounding on the walls of a polyglass prison.
Martin Podlove, who had put her mother away. Her mother, who had a name: Ora.
The war had been going on before—percolating, a pot simmering with the lid on. It was Go who had soaked Podlove’s employee, Go who had him on the run. Whether Go was behind his grandson’s murder, Ankit could not say. But Podlove probably thought so.
Hey there, crime boss lady, I think we have a common foe.
The man who is trying to destroy you destroyed my mother, and we should work together to destroy him and also rescue her.
And I know who he is—the man who killed Podlove’s grandson with a methane flare. His name is Ishmael Barron and he is in hiding, but I think I might be able to get in touch with him and he may be a useful bargaining chip.