Which didn’t make him a nice guy, and it didn’t mean he was immune to that wabenzi way they had of showing off just how damn well they were doing. Attah’s office had air conditioning sometimes, though right now all the windows were thrown open and there were a dozen flies drowned in the man’s cup of water. Attah had trophies, too. He had a desk of black wood big enough that Mao could have used it as a coffin. The top was old felt, sun-bleached and torn, but most of all valuable, antique. There were yellowing photographs on the wall behind him. One showed a view from the Roach Hotel from long-back, when it had been where the rich people came to see the animals that weren’t there anymore. There were things like cows, and there was grass that went up to the cows’ bellies, and out there was water, too, the sun like diamonds on the Ogooué back when it had been a river and not just a concrete road from the coast. The other photo was a man with a gun sitting proudly before the lion he’d just presumably killed. Mao had spent too long staring at that photo, marvelling at the sheer alien nature of it: not the lion, which looked like something by a computer artist with no sense of the real, but the man: so white, so huge, vaster than the lion, clipping the edges of the photo, like an ogre. The past was another country, maybe another planet altogether.
Speaking of…
“You’re still running with Lupé?” Attah asked, fanning himself idly. The open windows stared out at the world as though watching for the first stirrings of a breeze.
“Yes, Contrôleur.” Mao was careful to mix the cocktail of his language to the genteel standard suitable for someone of Attah’s position: more French, more English, less Afrikaans and Bantu, absolutely no Viet slang. “You need, I can get her.”
“I need,” said Attah, heartfelt. “Her, you. Got me a situation here needs fixing.”
“Nothing she can’t fix, Contrôleur.”
“That’s what I want to hear. This is top dollar bizna, boy.” Attah grinned: good, white teeth, so even you could use a spirit level on them. The show of money should have been something to put Mao in his place, but there was something of the cheeky child in that smile, something irrepressible that decades in Achouka hadn’t ground out of the man. “Who else is there knows their tech? Need more than two of you? Akiloye?”
“Got hurt, Contrôleur. Cut foot, went bad.”
Attah’s expression soured. “Who else?”
“Hotep, Contrôleur.”
“Hah?”
“The spacegirl. Took her with me to Ayem when the condensation plant was down, last time. Got it running, double-quick.”
The Contrôleur’s expression soured further, meaning he had remembered just who Hotep was. Mostly trouble, but the girl had all the knowledge an expensive technical education could buy: an education never intended for slumming it groundside at the Ankara.
“Take her, then. Take her, take Lupé.” Attah shunted over a tablet holding the meagre briefing. “Take a ’Bug. Get this fucking sorted and it’s bonuses all round. Double-double danger pay.”
Mao nearly swore in front of the man; that meant a lot of money indeed. “Which way is this trouble, Contrôleur?” And he knew the answer, because any other point of the compass and he’d be offered standard or straight danger money, and if he didn’t like it there’d be plenty others willing. “South, then?” South: the Estate.
Attah nodded sombrely. “Mao, you’re a good boy, you’ve got a good crew. Double-triple.” And no haggling, no attempt to disguise the fact that the Man was riding Attah just the way Attah wasn’t riding his subordinates. He’s on the plate, sure enough. Time to go find Lupé and Hotep and put civilization behind them.
A FIREWALKER CREW could be two people for small jobs, could be six, eight, for big. Mao’d had a bad experience, out on a six-man crew except the wages were short and so someone had tried to have only a two-man crew come back. He’d been fifteen. He’d been left for dead. Now he was nineteen, a whole world of experience on, and he didn’t go out with big crews, or with people he didn’t know if he could absolutely avoid it. What he did was get results from the people he trusted.
A crew needed tough and muscle, and Mao brought that. A crew needed skills, too. Just one head crammed full of computer and mech repair meant if something happened to its owner, the rest of them were screwed. More bitter experience meant Mao took a fix-it for the mech stuff, a hacker for the computer tech. Most crews then threw in three more mouths who were there mostly to eat food and be someone’s useless cousin; Mao kept things lean. He was pathfinder, strongarm, marksman all in one. Lupé was mech, and he’d have to hope he could talk Hotep into doing tech, because it was that or some stranger who thought they could code.
Most Firewalker mechs would be in the township off-shift, and if they needed work they’d be in the fix-it shops where everyone brought all the crap that stopped working, or sold all the crap that had never worked. Lupé had started off there, same as everyone, working for her fix-it uncle at his tin-roofed little place out in Willaumez Neighbourhood. Everyone worked in Achouka—no room for luxuries like staying home. Boys grew up running errands, salvaging, joining gangs and fighting each other over street corners. While they were out doing that, there were schools that taught girls mech work, because everything was a resource in Achouka and nothing was wasted. It wasn’t that Lupé had a magic touch for getting broken-down machines working again, because there were a score of genius fixers working invisibly in the township on any given day. What got her noticed was how her home block suddenly had access to the Roach Hotel wi-fi, running water and makeshift solar collectors on the roof. These days, if you wanted Lupé, you’d find her in or on the Hotel itself, fixing for the rich because she had family to feed too.
Most kids on her pay grade would have been trying to get others in to do their work for them, for a fraction of the pay. Mutunbo Lupé just liked the feel of the metal under her fingers, though. She liked making it all fit together. She was the best there was, or at least the best Mao could afford. They’d worked together almost two years now, half his Firewalking life.
He caught her as she came off shift, down from the AC units up top of the Hotel. That was her favourite work, when she could get it: the view of the Anchor field was second to none, she said. A clear sight of the cable base, all those warehouses and offices dedicated to sending everything that mattered skywards, up out of the atmosphere to where the spaceship was. In Mao’s dad’s time it had still mostly been the physical material itself: the rare elements, the bulk metals, all the slack from when the asteroid mines weren’t performing as intended. These days the ship up there, the Grand Celeste, was fully built and fitted out, a luxury liner to eternity, ready to coast out its days in orbit or go colonise Mars, or head to an exoplanet on a trail beaten by robot probes.
Anywhere but here.
Mutunbo Lupé was local girl through and through: dark, stocky, her wiry hair pulled into Bantu knots. She always wore overalls two sizes too large, which spare space seemed able to magically furnish her with tools, food and, on one fraught occasion, a gun.
“Here’s trouble,” she observed, spotting Mao loitering. “M’bolo, chief. How did I know I’d see you today?”