Up Against It - M. J. Locke [7]
“That’s Hersh and Alex,” Ivan told him, pointing. “They’re twins. Eight, now. And the little girl is Maia. She’s six.”
“Cute kids.”
He gestured; the image vanished. “I’d do anything for them.”
“Of course you would.” Carl eyed him, worried. Ivan stepped into his work boots and strapped on his safety glasses. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Um, get what over with, exactly?”
“Nothing. I just … miss them, you know?”
“Sure.” Carl eyed him, concerned.
Ivan glanced around. “Listen, will you do a favor for me? I left some of my tools back in the locker room. Could you go get them?”
“Mike will be pissed…”
“Nah, he won’t even notice.”
Ivan had a point. Mike rarely emerged from his office before lunchtime. “All right, sure.”
“It’s a small orange pouch with some fittings and clamps. It’s in my locker.”
Ivan leapt up to the crane operator cage mounted on the ceiling and climbed inside as Carl bounded back down the tube toward the offices. As luck would have it, though, Mike wasn’t in his office; he was at a tunnel junction just down the way. His gaze fell on Carl. “What are you doing wandering around the tunnels?”
“Ivan sent me for a tool kit.”
“I don’t pay you to run errands for the other workers. Kovak can get his own damn tools. Get back to work!”
Carl eyed him, fuming. He did have a way to strike back at Mike. The resource commissioner, Jane Navio, was a friend of his parents, and had pulled some strings to get Carl this job. She was Mike’s boss’s boss’s boss. All he had to do was drop a word in his mom’s ear, and before long, the hammer would come down on Mike.
But Mike’s petty tyrannies weren’t the commissioner’s problem. Someday soon, Carl thought, I’m going to be a ship’s captain, and you’ll still be slinging bug juice and smelling like garbage. “You’re the boss.”
“You got that right,” Mike said, and floated off.
Carl went back to the trash warehouse, slapped on bug neutralizer lotion, got his bug juice tester from the benches, and headed over toward the vats. Ivan was working over at Vat 3A. Carl shouted up at him, “Sorry! No tools! Mike’s on a tear!” but Ivan was doing something in the cab and did not see Carl, and the noise drowned him out. Oh, well. Later, then. Carl got to work.
Per safety rules, the tester never worked at the same vat that the crane operator did. The crane operator cages rode on rails that crisscrossed the open space below the geodesic ceiling. The cranes had long robotic arms that the operator used to lift the bunkers of trash and carry and tilt the debris into the funnels atop the disassembly vats.
There were two kinds of bugs. Assemblers built things: furniture, machine parts, food, walls, whatever. Disassemblers took matter down to its component atoms, and sorted it all into small, neat blocks or bubbles, to be collected, stored, and used the next time those compounds were needed.
Disassemblers were restricted in town. The specialty ones that only broke down matter of a particular kind—a specific metal, or a particular class of polymer, or whatever—those were the only ones they used down in Zekeston, and even then, only in small quantities. Trash bugs were much more useful—and much more dangerous. Not only did they break down all materials, but they were programmed to copy themselves out of whatever was handy when their numbers dropped too low. That’s what they used out at the warehouses.
Carl went over to the sample port on the side of the first vat, put on his goggles, and stuck the probe into the port. Then he heard a guttural scream overhead. Something small flew out of the crane cab and struck the floor not far from him. Something bloody.
He heard a loud crash. Debris scattered. It was Ivan’s dumpster—he had dropped it. Carl looked up. The crane’s grappling arm pointed at the third vat like a spear, and the crane plummeted straight down toward it. He caught a glimpse of Ivan’s pale, wide-eyed face as first the arm, then his cage, plunged into the