Up Against It - M. J. Locke [109]
Good-bye, she thought. Everything she had built. All the sacrifices. She had tried to make a difference. She had spent the last twelve years of her life wrangling, dealing, confronting, managing, worrying—swallowed by the needs of the cluster. She did not even know who she was anymore, outside this job.
Public sentiment against you is growing. She gazed at the bad-sammies that flooded her sammy cache, a bleeding flood relieved only by a meager tinge of green, she felt heartsick. How could they all abandon her like this? Everything she had done, she had done for the citizens of Phocaea.
Screw it, she thought, screw them all, and she brought up the trebling software to delete all her files, and Jonesy, too. Trebling was a military-standard file-deletion process that destroyed any trace of the original data. Her fingers hovered over the activation key. Dozens of years of knowledge and experience. Decision-making tools she had built. A Knox of intellectual treasures she had collected and constructed. Not having access to these would make Aaron’s work a lot more difficult. And of course, he would also catch hell for sending the agents away and allowing her this opportunity.
Let him create his own schedules and assessments. Let him start from scratch, the way I did, she thought. Why should he benefit from all my hard work?
Her enemies had won. She was taking the fall for something the mob and a freak-of-nature sapient had done. She had spent years making sure the people of Phocaea got the resources they needed, and what did she end up with? A cushy bribe and a boot out the door.
In the end she left the files alone. She packed up the hangings and knickknacks, shut down, compressed, and downloaded Jonesy, then backed up and then trebled her personal files. She left instructions for Marty on everything else. Let them sort out the rest. She towed her boxes out and gave them a shove toward the main entrance.
Behind her, the door snicked shut: a smirking whisper of a sound. Good-bye.
21
That morning the circuit trolleys were still down so Xuan, Charles, and Rowan had to rely on their own hands and feet to propel themselves down the avenue to their offices at the university.
The extent of damage out here on the Rim level was shocking. Debris and rubble were strewn over everything. Teams of surveyors were out with their theodolites, transits, and compasses. Bug veins and meshes had already grown up out of grates in the flooring and begun their work of mending cracks in the bulkheads and breaking down the old and broken infrastructure. The air that morning smelled of solvent, copper, and new plastic. Xuan also saw the odd miniature glass-bead skeleton running around here and there. Not many people were on campus.
He parted ways with Charles and Rowan at the geology center and lofted himself down the tunnel to his office. After assigning his grad students—the two who had shown up—to Kukuyoshi repairs, he headed to an emergency meeting with the deans, department heads, and key administrators to finish fleshing out their plan for rescuing as much as they could from Kukuyoshi. Charles ran the meeting. In moments, though, someone broke in to tell them about the prime minister’s press conference. They broke off their discussion and displayed the press conference in the wavespace they shared. Benavidez came on and announced that Phocaea had reached agreement with Ogilvie & Sons, Inc. on a new ice delivery.
“The ice shipment will arrive two weeks from this coming Wednesday,” the PM said. Cheers broke out around Xuan. “In an abundance of caution, rationing will remain in place until then. But I rejoice with my fellow Phocaeans that help is on the way. In the meantime, I ask everyone to remain calm and go about their daily business.”
“On a separate note, Commissioner Navio has tendered her resignation. I have accepted it. I want to thank her for her efforts on behalf of the citizens