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“Where are you from?”
Sudden sidelong glance. Now he had her attention.
“That’s a long story, Scott.” She sipped her coffee. “You sure you want to be that bored?”
“I won’t be. I like hearing about places I haven’t been.”
“Makes you think I’m from someplace else?”
But she gri
“Come on, Carmen. You wouldn’t be working for Ward if you were Rim born and bred. None of us would.” He nodded around at the clientele, dropped his voice a prudent couple of notches. “Everyone in this place is from someplace else. I don’t figure you for any different.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Detective, huh?”
“I just pay attention,” he said.
“Yeah, I guess you do.”
“So come on—tell me. Where’d you swing in from?”
There was a long pause. Scott waited. He’d had these moments before with fellow illegals, the weightless gap before trust engaged, before each one shed the load of suspicion and talked together like two free Americans once would have done, back before the internationalist scum and the Chinese—political Chinese, he reminded himself, you’re not a racist, Scott—broke apart the greatest nation on the face of the Earth and cast down the fractured remnants like Moses breaking the tablets.
“Taiwan,” she said, and his heart welled up with the knowledge that yes, she did trust him. “You heard of Taiwan?”
“Right. I mean, sure.” Falling over himself in eagerness. “That’s in China, right? It’s, like, a Chinese province.”
Ren snorted. “They fucking wish. It’s an island, and it’s off the coast of China, you got that right. But we’re an independent state. Written that way into every Pacific Rim trade agreement and nonproliferation pact in the last hundred years. What you call a hothouse economy, same status as the Angeline Freeport, same hyperpowered output and no one wants to fuck with it in case they break it and the whole Rim feels the backwash. That’s where I grew up.”
“So why’d you leave?”
She gave him a sharp look, for all it had been an i
“I mean,” he stumbled. “I guess you weren’t happy there, right? But, you know, it sounds like the kind of place a person would be happy.”
She smiled a little. “Well, it has its upsides. But even in hothouse economies, you got losers as well as wi
“Got that right.” He’d worked in the Freeport on and off, would never go back if he didn’t have to.
“Okay, so like I said, wi
“You don’t want to talk like that, Carmen.” Scott leaned across the table, earnest. “You’re not a loser just on account of you gotta go somewhere else to make a better life for yourself. None of us is a loser here, we’re just looking for that opportunity to get back on the horse.”
For a moment, it got him a blank look. Then the confusion cleared from her porcelain face. “Ah, right. Culture gap. No, I’m not talking about losers the way you people do. I mean losers in the trade-off. Some win, some lose, the wheel goes ’round. That kind of thing.”
“You people?” He tried to hide the hurt. “What do you mean, you people?”
“You know, guys like you.” She gestured impatiently. “Old Americans, heart-landers. From the Republic.”
“Oh, okay. But look, Carmen.” He allowed himself a superior smile. “We’re not the old Americans, that’s the Union, that sell-out eastern scum, all their UN-loving pals. The Confederated Republic is the New America. We’re the Phoenix rising, Carm.”
“Right.”
“I mean, uhm,” he stumbled again, looking for language that wouldn’t offend. “Look, I know probably you didn’t go to a church the same way I always did, guess for you it was some kind of temple or something, but in the end it’s the same thing, right?” Pleased with himself for the way he’d eased out from under Pastor William’s unremitting hellfire and One True Christ ranting, seen a better light in the succession of more moderate churches he’d had to make do with over the last couple of years. “I mean whatever you call God, if you accept that God as your guiding principle the way the Republic does, then any nation that does that has to succeed, right? Has to rise up in the end, no matter what Satan does to lay snares in our path.”
Ren looked at him thoughtfully. “Are you really a, uh, a Christian?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So you belie—”
Her phone blipped at them. She fished it out and put it to her ear.
“Yeah?” Features tautening, the way he’d seen it that morning when the news about the humidity loop came through. “Got it. Be right there.”
She snapped the phone off again.
“Ward,” she said. “He’s back, and he’s pretty fucking pissed off.”
Pretty pissed off was about right. Scott could hear Ward’s bellowing through the metal walls of the con room while they were still at the far end of the corridor. He followed Ren along the narrow space, hurrying to keep up with her curiously long, rapid strides. He would have tried to get ahead of her, to go first in case Nocera was still behaving like an asshole, but there was no room to pass, and anyway…
The door sliced back to admit them. Ward’s rage boiled out, suddenly on full audio. Scott was used to the sound, but this time he thought there was an edge on the voice he hadn’t heard before, something that went well beyond anger.
“…the fucking point of all this pla
He shut up as he saw them. Ulysses Ward was a big, bearish man, muscular from the constant sub-aqua and surface swimming time the business demanded, balding in a way you didn’t see so much of on this side of the fenceline. He flushed when he got angry, as he was now, and he punctuated his speech with aggressive motion of limbs and head. Scott had never seen him actually hit anyone, but he often gave the impression that it wasn’t entirely out of the question. Nocera, perhaps wisely, had given him center stage in the con room, and he stood there now, fists clenched.
“We’re back,” said Ren superfluously.
“So I fucking see.” Ward seemed to notice Scott for the first time. “You, get down to the sub dock and take a look at the air scrubbers on Lastman. Felt like I was breathing farts and fumes the last hour back, I nearly fucking had to surface it got so bad.”
For about half a second, before he spotted the idiocy of it, Scott thought about refusing to leave Ren until Ward had calmed down. He swallowed instead, said: “Might be a compatibility problem, all that software we took out of, uh, Fell 8 was—”
Ward pi
“Well, no, but—”
“No, that’s right. Because I didn’t fucking hire you as a software specialist. So why don’t you get the fuck down there like I asked you to and take a fucking look at what you can fucking fix for me. All right? Simple enough for you?”
Scott looked at him, knowing he was flushing. Breathed in hard, nodded on clenched teeth and lips pulled tight.
“Good, then why are you still standing here?”
Scott wheeled about and plunged back into the corridor, fury rising through him like heat. One more month, he promised himself silently. One more fucking month, and out. Before today, he’d thought Ward was okay, he’d thought the man was an American. Guy lost his temper now and then, but what real man didn’t. Point was, he knew where the lines were. But now, talking that way, treating Scott like he was some just-over-the-fence liability who’d fucked up when all the time it was Scott had been warning Ward that if you were going to ca