Up Against It - M. J. Locke [74]
“Easy there,” Sean said. “Officer, I happen to know this young man. He’s one of the biker heroes who stopped the runaway reaction up on the surface and saved our ice stores. I seriously doubt he’s a troublemaker.”
The police officer glanced at Sean’s badge. “All right, sir. We’re done with him, anyway. Stay away from riots in the future, young man.”
Outside in the traffic tubes, Sean turned to the kid. “What’s your name?”
“Kamal. Kamal Kurupath. My friends call me Kam. Thanks so much. I couldn’t get them to listen. All they cared about was the riot.”
“Tell me what’s going on. How are your friends in trouble?”
Kamal’s story came out in disjointed chunks, with frequent backtrackings, but gradually Sean got the gist. “You’re telling me your friend Geoff has several metric tons of ice?”
“Yes.”
“And the black marketers got wind of its existence.”
“Yes. And now he and Amaya and Ian may be in danger. Please. We have to help them. Right away!”
Sean sensed there was more to the story. “We will. But I’m hazy on the details. How did the black marketers find out about this ice of yours?”
Kamal averted his gaze with a shrug. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Geoff went to them, didn’t he? And got in over his head.”
Sweat beaded on Kamal’s upper lip. “Geoff would never do that!”
Sean gave him a searching look. “I want to help you, but I have to know what’s going on. You said yourself, your friends are already in trouble. The best way to help them is to tell me everything.”
“All right.” Kamal blew out an explosive breath. “Ian thought we could get more money than if we went to the banks. It wasn’t Geoff, honest—he said no. They fought, and Ian went off on his own. Geoff and Amaya went to stop him before he got to the black marketers.”
Sean rubbed his face. I so don’t have time for this. “Where is this deal going down? When?”
“Bottomsville. On the Promenade. Near Halloway Industrial Park. I left them over an hour ago. Almost two. I’m afraid we’re too late.”
“All right. Wait here and I’ll go talk to the police chief. They’ll send a patrol down with you to check it out.”
“They’re so busy. Won’t you come?” Kamal pointed at Sean’s badge. “You’re authorized. And you’re in charge of ice stores anyway, aren’t you?”
Sean sighed. Chasing sugar rocks wasn’t his idea of time well spent. But he was here now, he knew the kids involved, Jerry’s precinct was swamped.
And hell; he owed these kids. The whole cluster did. “All right. Let’s go.”
13
When Jane got back to her office, a false sense of busy normalcy had settled over the warrens where her Zekeston staff worked. First, she needed to check her messages—without Marty to screen them, she might miss something important. She called up her comm app and found hundreds of calls and messages from friends, acquaintances, and coworkers cramming her inbox, forwarding rumors about the supposed infection in their life-support area and asking if it were true.
She sent an encrypted e-mail to Chikuma, telling her about the feral sapient and her plans to extract it. Tell your contacts to prepare, Sensei, Jane wrote. Chikuma would make sure the city infrastructure was ready. The First Wavers had connections in every city department and system.
The second thing she found was that lots of new bad-sammies had entered her cache. Thomas had not just been blowing smoke. Bad viewer ratings from Downside were easy to blow off, but bad sammies from the people she was trying to help … that stung.
Next she studied Tania’s reports on the feral, and had Jonesy dredge up some research on the net. The first sapients had been created nearly two hundred years ago, during the twenty-first century. Most of the information was way outside her sphere of knowledge. She did glean that artificial sapients were nearly as different from each other as they were from humans. About the only thing they shared was a stunningly effective capacity to commandeer computerized systems and kill people.
Jane called Xuan. “The PM has arranged for quarters to be set aside for families of the staff, in Kukuyoshi near administration