He nodded, lips pursed.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well, what? Do you need me to give you an Obvious Award? Do you think I have a spare train sitting in my kitchen next to my anti-battlecruiser laser? Even if I did have a train somewhere, we’d never get it back on the tracks. None of those machines exist. Maybe one does somewhere in the galaxy, but you’ll never find it, and you’ll certainly never ship it here.”
“You’re just a bucket of positive energy. You should run for Governor.”
“No way, you’ll have me assassinated.”
“Ho ho ho. Did you make a new voting machine yet?”
“You’re worried about the election? How many people are going to vote during an insurrection?”
“So what have you been doing? Sitting in here eating and drinking as the city literally falls apart?” I asked, exasperated.
“I have a way to find 19-10,” he said casually.
“You already have one. That scanner thing. I gave it to MTB.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t work. I was just tired of listening to you.”
I stood up, about to throttle this three-eyed goon.
“Calm down,” he said.
“So what is this device? A magic whistle?” I asked.
“No, it’s so simple I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it before. Except that it was too simple. We have the greatest detectors in the known galaxy: the telescopes.”
I wasn’t ready for that.
“Can they even be turned to face us?”
“Sure. They can scan and transmit in 360 degrees. They just weren’t designed to look at something this nearby. I want to make sure I don’t irradiate everyone.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Is this going to kill us all?”
“Oh, you’ll be fine. You got dragged from a train and didn’t even get a scratch.”
“Not just me. The city.”
“It would be one way to quell the rioting…”
“Don’t joke. You can’t mess this up. No Delovoa half-assed attempts.”
“No need to be rude,” he pouted.
“Hey,” I said, thinking. “Could the telescopes be used to shoot space ships?”
“No. If they were close enough and the ships had thin enough hulls, I could maybe make the people onboard sterile. But that’s not much use unless you’re worried about generations of attackers.”
Ah, well.
“So think about doing the telescope thing. But be sure you have it perfect. And don’t do it without my consent,” I said.
“Oh, I’m not leaving here to go to the telescopes without a thousand Kommilaire guarding me. Not with a riot going on.”
“Well, don’t hold your farts waiting on a thousand Stair Boys. The most we’ve ever recruited is about four hundred.”
“And you complain that I just sit around doing nothing?”
CHAPTER 52
I couldn’t stop the Totki from sticking spears in the Order or the Olmarr from chainsawing the Totki.
But I could talk to the gangs. I understood gangs. They were a rational bunch of people. Smelly, but rational.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” I said.
“What’s wrong with it? You used to be just a hired thug in your day and you’ve become Supreme Kommilaire,” Lisedt said. “I’m now Queen Lisedt, Mistress of Belvaille.”
At least gangs came up with good titles. Lisedt was the woman I had saved from her two partners not long ago. The winds had shifted substantially and she found herself with a gang that was on the winning side. They were winning enough that she felt a coronation was appropriate.
“No one is going to accept that. No one has ever ‘ruled’ Belvaille.”
“What about Garm?” she challenged.
“Except her. Garm still rules Belvaille. But she’s not a gang. She owns the dump.”
“Says who? I don’t see her.” Lisedt crossed her arms.
We were in one of Lisedt’s clubs. She had about thirty guys with weapons protecting her. Some were bandaged and beaten from the ongoing fights.
“I can’t see… protons, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” I said, frustrated.
“What’s a protons?”
“What would a queen even do?” I said, trying to tackle this from another angle.
“Rule Belvaille,” she said haughtily.
“What’s that mean, though? What do you do about crime and the feral kids and electricity and shipping and the telescopes and trials?”
“Fix them,” she said.
I asked the Kommilaire for an Inventory.
It’s when they go out and get the names and businesses of all the gangs operating and their relationships and locations. To the best of their abilities.
Long ago I knew all the gang bosses and most of the criminals in the entire city. But now there were far too many. There could be ten gangs operating in one block easily.
While it was a pretty chaotic time to get an Inventory, I wanted to see if I could get in front of some of the gangs and maybe slow things down or speed them up. At least make it less volatile.
I had to pay Rendrae a significant amount of money to fill in the details since he had so many contacts. He knew what was going on more than anyone. Everyone knew Rendrae and knew he was unbiased.
Maybe his image had been slightly tarnished with his news reports on Judge Naeb and such, but he was still the least stinky turd in the outhouse.
“Let me show you how I see things,” Dimi-Vim said.
He was the furry man who had been one of Lisedt’s partners. Now he was wearing fancy clothes and had trimmed all his hair and looked quite respectable.
Rendrae notified me that Dimi-Vim had something I might want to check out.
We were on the ground floor of one of his clubs. The club was still going on because he didn’t want to lose revenue, but it meant we had to shout. And my hearing wasn’t as good as it used to be.
“What?” I asked, for the tenth time.
“Look!”
Dimi-Vim unfurled a gigantic map on four tables that had been pushed together. It showed his section of the city, all color-coded with markers and pins and symbols.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s cool. Where did you get this?”
“I made it,” he said proudly.
This would be a great starting point for our Inventory. I don’t know why I never thought of using maps before. We just used paper and talked about it. Sometimes we had rough sketches, but Dimi-Vim had the whole topology of the city here.
“Hey, make me a copy of this.”
“No,” he said, trying to cover the enormous map with two hands. “This is my competitive advantage.”
“I’m not in business against you,” I said.
“You are, kind of. I mean you aren’t in business with us.”
“It’s not like you can only be one or the other. This will help out my team.”
“Why would I want to help you guys? You’re police.”
“Please, what?” I asked.
“Po-lice!” He yelled over the music.
“It’s not like I’m arresting you. I’m here to try and help you.”
“Then tell me what the other gangs are doing.”
I shrugged.
“Lisedt wants to be a queen,” I said.
“She’s crazy, no one cares about her.”
“I’m just trying to negotiate what you all want. Besides, I could just take that map.”
“Hank, you came here under a white banner,” one of his men said.
“What?” I didn’t hear him.
“White banner. Banner. White. You can’t take it,” all his men yelled.
“Right. I wouldn’t take it. But I’m saying I could.”
“Yeah, but we know you won’t. So it’s not a threat,” Dimi-Vim said.
“No, I’m not threatening you. I’m…” What was I saying? All this yelling was confusing me. I think I had a residual concussion from my train trip as well. “Let me just have a copy of the map. I won’t give it to anyone else.”