Kafari knew the house, had stopped a couple of times, on her way home from work, to visit Dinny and Aisha and Emmeline Ghamal. It was the PSF barracks house operated by the Hancock Family Cooperative, on the Adero floodplain. The Hancock family members were among the most decent, honest people anywhere on Jefferson. What could possibly have gone wrong, for an accusation like that to be thrown at them?
The farmyard was full of emergency vehicles, most of them bearing the emblem of the infamous federal police force known colloquially as P-Squads. Men in coroners’ uniforms were carrying out body bags. Lots of them. Pol Jankovitch was putting on a great show for his spectators, flashing photographs of fifteen victims, all of whom looked like school children. Pol, whose performance tottered back and forth across a line between stern outrage and hushed grief, was saying, ”… peaceful protestors, just ordinary boys anxious to focus public attention on the farm crisis. All they wanted to do was show people the truth about food hoarding. They didn’t even have to drive far from home to prove their point.
“This house,” he pointed toward the almost military-style barracks the Hancock Family Cooperative had been forced to rent at premium rates, “is part of a government-owned Populist Support Farm just three and a half kilometers from Port Town. The poorest children on Jefferson live next door to farms like this one, where barns are bulging with high-quality food those children will never see.”
You buggering snake! She closed her hands around the edge of her desk, so tightly her palms hurt. The Hancock family — like thousands of other Grangers forced into the Populist Support Farm System — worked under slave-labor conditions on PSF before trudging home to put in more hours working their own land. Not one ounce of PSF food went into a Granger’s mouth. They ate only the food they could grow on their own land, unless they wanted to risk prison and rehab. If PSF food wasn’t being distributed to the poor, Kafari wanted to know just who the hell was getting it.
She clicked through coverage from every major broadcasting company on Jefferson, just to ground herself in the official version of things. Then she went to Anish Balin’s Sounding the Alarm datachat. Rather, she tried to go there. It took nearly five full minutes to gain access, which told her a great deal about the number of people trying to get in. Anish Balin’s hard-hitting and argumentative style had drawn a lot of fire, even amongst the Granger community. People who worried about Grangers’ public image and reprisals were afraid of someone as outspoken and seemingly paranoid as the self-styled Fearless Firebrand.
When she finally got in, the whole screen lit up with two brutal words: FIRST LIE!
Thirty photographs popped up, in two columns. The left-hand side showed the same images Pol Jankovitch and the other sludge slingers were distributing. The right-hand column showed a different set of photographs. On the left were fifteen boys. Kids with hardened, street-tough faces, but obviously no more than twelve or thirteen years old. On the right, were fifteen corresponding young men, husky with adult musculature, sporting moustaches, nano-tatts, and lip-plugs. The youngest was, at a bare minimum, twenty-two or twenty-three. It was clear that these were, in fact, the same individuals. You could see it in bone structure, the placement and angle of ears, the shape and cleft of chins. “First lie” was right. Pol Jankovitch’s “peaceful protestors” and “ordinary boys” were a decade older than the photos he was plastering all over his broadcast. When the screen auto-faded to the next page, which screamed SECOND LIE! Kafari’s shock gave way to jaw-crunching rage.
Since the Hancock Family Co-op was large enough to have more than a dozen children under the age of two, POPPA had installed security cameras throughout the PSF barracks to ensure the “safety and social welfare” of the toddlers and infants while their parents worked in the government’s fields and barns. Such cameras were standard features at PSF “homes” throughout Jefferson, auto-programmed to begin recording whenever motion and sound sensors determined that a PSF crew had arrived to log their mandatory fifty hours a week in public fields.
Those cameras had been running when Pol Jankovitch’s “protestors” burst into the house. Anish Balin had managed to hack into the PSF security system, downloading the video before the P-Squads got there. He was replaying it in a perpetual loop. The security cameras — three of them, one covering the mess hall and kitchen, one covering the nursery and play area, and one covering the sleeping dormitory — caught the confusion and screams caused by fifteen grown men literally kicking the door off its hinges. The gutter patois they started shouting identified them instantly as members of a Port Town rat-gang. So called for their habit of preying on “space rats” — freighter crews who operated the cargo shuttles between spacedock at Ziva Two and Port Abraham — they were the most vicious urban criminals ever bred on Jefferson, although the P-Squads occasionally gave them a good run for the money.
The rat-gang burst into the house, wearing masks and brandishing weapons. The only people in the house were grandmothers and little ones too young for federally mandated daycare. The gang rounded everybody up and herded them into the dormitory that served as bedroom. What happened next…
Kafari felt sick to the basement of her soul.
The ones not busy having fun with their victims were rushing through the house, ordered by their leaders to ransack nearby storage sheds and barns and raid the vegetable plots and smokehouse, looting everything that looked remotely edible or valuable enough to sell. Kafari’s breath caught when she recognized Aisha Ghamal.
The camera revealed what the rat-gangers hadn’t seen — she’d managed to key an emergency alarm on her wrist-comm without being seen by her captors, sending a distress call to the planetary emergency system. Anish Balin had managed to download the official response to that emergency calclass="underline" a recording that said, “All local law enforcement agents are busy. Your complaint will be forwarded to the appropriate department in charge of vandalism and petty theft. Have a nice day.”
Two and a half minutes after that message went out, rat-gangers who’d been looting outside burst back into the house, yelling a warning at their friends. Zippers went up in haste as they broke out windows to shoot at targets outside. Aisha’s message had gone out to family members in the fields, as well as the police.
In the confusion that erupted, with rat-gangers firing through the windows, dodging back to avoid return fire and reloading their weapons, Aisha Ghamal dove under a barracks-room bed, knocking it over with a crash. She came up with a handgun concealed under the bed frame. She fired repeatedly, taking down two of the men at the windows. Most of the gang scattered, diving for cover, but one of the bastards stood his ground. They centered one another simultaneously. Aisha beat him to the trigger pull—
—and her gun just clicked. She’d shot it dry.
“Fuckin’ jomo bitch!” he snarled. Then he shot her, high in the chest. She spun and dropped, going down with a gasping cry of pain and a spattering of blood across her dress, the overturned bed, the wall. She hit the floor just as the door burst open. The men and women shooting their way into the house showed no mercy. Cold hatred had turned their faces to stone. They were beyond angry, beyond anything human. POPPA had worked them nearly to death, had confiscated their crops, their money, in some cases their land.
And now a stinking rat-gang had smashed its way into their lives, bent on torture and destruction. The Hancock adults fired and fired and fired, shooting every single member of the gang, pumping extra rounds into anyone whose fingers even twitched around a weapon. Kafari sat with the back of her hand pressed against her lips, shaking and crying at the slaughter on screen.