that covering all your bets was the mark of courageous journalism, I had to admit she’d summed it up pretty well. Still, she seemed more excited by the prospect of all that crushing guilt than in a less dramatic outcome. It would make a better story, I guess.
There was some feed of Gaant’s speech about the über-rich being über-greedy—lots of people hailing him as a genius, although for my money it didn’t take a towering intellect to state the obvious. Rich people like money? Wow! What an idea!
Besides, I wasn’t sure he was right about this whole mess being about greed, at least on a personal level. I thought it was more about inertia. The plot to strip Tweezaa of her inheritance now, the systematic fleecing of the rest of the Cottohazz for the last hundred years—that’s just what everyone at the top does. It’s not about money in any tangible sense. They do it because that’s what they always do—that’s what they’ve been trained to do. That’s what’s expected. If they don’t do it, their friends will look at them funny and stop taking their calls.
Years earlier I’d made the mistake of thinking the Varoki were united in a single-minded quest to screw the living hell out of Humans. Getting caught in the middle of a shooting war between two Varoki nations put that idea to rest, but I still didn’t think the differences went any deeper than this nation against that one, this mercantile house against that one. Wrong again, Sasha. There were fault lines in this society which went all the way down, and now I felt as if I was watching them widen before my eyes, like the cracks in an ice shelf just before ten thousand tons of white stuff calve off and thunder down into the ocean. Where was this going to end? I had no idea.
Something bothered me, though—something other than the possible descent into chaos and anarchy of the strongest and most economically important Varoki nation, or even the effect of that descent on my chances of getting away. There was something odd about the vid feed of Gaant’s speech.
I watched it again. It was clearly made by someone sitting at the opposition staff table, given the angle. You could see several of the big-shots at the main table and across from them Gaisaana-la and behind her the looming massif of ah-Quan. I played it all the way through and then again, and again. It was just as I remembered it, so what was bothering me?
I played it again, and it was still the same, right up to that little gesture Gaant made at the end, that signal.
The signal that told his accomplice to drop the jammers.
Right. He finished his speech, he gave the signal, and the jammers quit, so everyone could start recording the meeting. So how the hell could there be a recording of his speech, which was before the jammers went down?
* * *
Interesting as that question was, my problem still came down to getting the hell out of there, and I still wasn’t sure how to accomplish that. Assuming things were temporarily calm, I could try to make it to the apartment in Praha-Riz. The fires at the arcology had been external and there was probably a lot of stuff busted up inside as well, but our apartment was in rich folks’ country, and the Munies seemed to be protecting that sort of landscape. I had firearms stashed there as well as additional cash, a forged ID, and the access controls to my emergency retransmission sites seeded around the city—highly illegal here in Bakaa, but put in place just for a situation like this, an emergency getaway. The retransmission sites let me use my embedded commlink while making it nearly impossible to locate. It wasn’t foolproof, but it would give me enough head start to get out of Dodge. But I had to get there to activate it.
The question was how could I get from Katammu-Arc to Praha-Riz? With security high, if I took the maglev train or an air shuttle I’d have to do an ID scan, and with the summons out there was no telling what would happen next. Or I
There was some feed of Gaant’s speech about the über-rich being über-greedy—lots of people hailing him as a genius, although for my money it didn’t take a towering intellect to state the obvious. Rich people like money? Wow! What an idea!
Besides, I wasn’t sure he was right about this whole mess being about greed, at least on a personal level. I thought it was more about inertia. The plot to strip Tweezaa of her inheritance now, the systematic fleecing of the rest of the Cottohazz for the last hundred years—that’s just what everyone at the top does. It’s not about money in any tangible sense. They do it because that’s what they always do—that’s what they’ve been trained to do. That’s what’s expected. If they don’t do it, their friends will look at them funny and stop taking their calls.
Years earlier I’d made the mistake of thinking the Varoki were united in a single-minded quest to screw the living hell out of Humans. Getting caught in the middle of a shooting war between two Varoki nations put that idea to rest, but I still didn’t think the differences went any deeper than this nation against that one, this mercantile house against that one. Wrong again, Sasha. There were fault lines in this society which went all the way down, and now I felt as if I was watching them widen before my eyes, like the cracks in an ice shelf just before ten thousand tons of white stuff calve off and thunder down into the ocean. Where was this going to end? I had no idea.
Something bothered me, though—something other than the possible descent into chaos and anarchy of the strongest and most economically important Varoki nation, or even the effect of that descent on my chances of getting away. There was something odd about the vid feed of Gaant’s speech.
I watched it again. It was clearly made by someone sitting at the opposition staff table, given the angle. You could see several of the big-shots at the main table and across from them Gaisaana-la and behind her the looming massif of ah-Quan. I played it all the way through and then again, and again. It was just as I remembered it, so what was bothering me?
I played it again, and it was still the same, right up to that little gesture Gaant made at the end, that signal.
The signal that told his accomplice to drop the jammers.
Right. He finished his speech, he gave the signal, and the jammers quit, so everyone could start recording the meeting. So how the hell could there be a recording of his speech, which was before the jammers went down?
* * *
Interesting as that question was, my problem still came down to getting the hell out of there, and I still wasn’t sure how to accomplish that. Assuming things were temporarily calm, I could try to make it to the apartment in Praha-Riz. The fires at the arcology had been external and there was probably a lot of stuff busted up inside as well, but our apartment was in rich folks’ country, and the Munies seemed to be protecting that sort of landscape. I had firearms stashed there as well as additional cash, a forged ID, and the access controls to my emergency retransmission sites seeded around the city—highly illegal here in Bakaa, but put in place just for a situation like this, an emergency getaway. The retransmission sites let me use my embedded commlink while making it nearly impossible to locate. It wasn’t foolproof, but it would give me enough head start to get out of Dodge. But I had to get there to activate it.
The question was how could I get from Katammu-Arc to Praha-Riz? With security high, if I took the maglev train or an air shuttle I’d have to do an ID scan, and with the summons out there was no telling what would happen next. Or I
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