The Rise of Io Read online

  “This is just a test to see how you move,” Manish said. “I’ll have the boy go easy on you.”

  Melonhead, or Aarav, looked down at her in disgust. “You want me to beat this ragged stick?”

  “Seems I’m the only one between us who has one,” she shot back. She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. Maybe antagonizing this large brutish man wasn’t the smartest idea. Sometimes, Ella just had no control over what she said.

  That is something we are going to have to work on.

  Melonhead scowled and reached for a set of boxing gloves. He slipped them on and slammed them together with a loud whack. “We’ll see what we can do about that big mouth of yours.”

  Ella’s eyes widened as Melonhead climbed in and lumbered toward her. He looked much bigger up close. He kind of smelled like dirty undergarments too, but that was the least of her worries right now.

  Melonhead slapped his gloves together twice more and opened his arms. “Give me your best shot, little weed.”

  Ella figured she only had one chance, which was to take him by surprise. She charged forward and nailed him as hard as she could in the stomach. Her fist made a small indentation in his belly and she bounced backward, tumbling onto the mat. Melonhead and the few curious spectators standing around the ring laughed uproariously.

  His body is too thick and well padded. Your only option is to tire him out. You are quick and nimble. Avoid him.

  Ella got to her feet and snarled at his stupid grin. “Screw that.”

  “You want more?” Melonhead said. He patted his belly and opened his arms again. “I’ll give you one more try, and then I’m going to clobber–”

  Before he could finish his sentence, Ella stomped up to him, pulled an arm back as if she were going to throw a punch, and then kicked him in the groin as hard as she could. Melonhead squeaked and fell to his knees. It made him just the right height for her to take another swing at his face. She connected to his chubby cheeks and sprained her thumb badly. Fortunately, it didn’t take much more to knock him down as Melonhead tipped over to his side, sniveling and moaning in pain.

  You do know that boxing uses only hands, right?

  “There are no rules where I come from.”

  There was a brief moment of shocked silence, and then all the spectators began muttering amongst themselves. Several shot dark looks at her. The mood in the gym got ugly.

  Ella hurried out of the ring and shook her gloves at Hamilton. “Take these off and let’s get out of here before they lynch me.”

  Hamilton scanned the room and hastened to unlace her gloves. “That was probably unwise. We may need to fight our way out of here after all.”

  The low chatter grew louder, and before she knew it, Ella found herself surrounded by a small mob. She reached for her shank which, of course, wasn’t there.

  “Damn that sneaky old man.” She had never missed her shank so badly in her life. “We’re in trouble now.”

  Manish stepped in front of them and waved everybody back. He glanced over at Melonhead still writhing in the boxing ring. He yelled at the angry group. “What’s the lesson here?”

  “Don’t box with cheaters,” someone shouted.

  “Don’t box with a girl.”

  “Don’t let a girl in the gym next time.”

  The comments only got uglier. Ella balled her fists and raged, but she was outnumbered twenty to one. She looked over at Hamilton, who actually managed to appear even angrier. At that moment, she decided to forgive him for being a coward.

  “No, you idiots,” Manish said. “The lesson to learn is to shut your mouth, stop showboating, and get your punch off first. It doesn’t matter who your opponent is. Aarav’s head is too big, he opened his mouth too many times, and he got his lund kicked.” He looked over at Ella. “You two have wasted enough of my day. Get out of here.”

  Ella and Hamilton beat a hasty retreat toward the front. “We’ll find someone else to train you, I promise,” said Hamilton.

  “I don’t want anyone to train me at all,” she grumbled.

  Manish called after them. “Tomorrow morning, be here at seven, got it? There’ll be less of my kids around. We can get to work then.”

  Both Ella and Hamilton turned around and looked back at the coach. Ella was reluctant to say yes, but she also didn’t want to say no. “OK.”

  “That’s ‘OK, coach,’ to you, girl.”

  Twelve

  The Carrot

  At first, the Quasing simply existed inside the dense liquid on the surface of Quasar that we call the Eternal Sea. Like most intelligent life, we became self-aware. We bred and evolved, and eventually discovered that we could join with each other, combining to transform into something greater.

  Over time, the Eternal Sea became one giant living being, integrating all the Quasing together. We shared our collective memories, knowledge, and experiences. We were able to mature our young quickly through osmosis and drastically increased our reproduction cycle. We grew, evolved, and became ambitious.

  * * *

  The route to the build site took Shura through some colorful and seedy parts of Surat. For some reason, the minister had tried to shield her from the more impoverished and blighted areas of the city, as if she were some porcelain noble who had never seen abject poverty.

  Having been on the front lines for most of the war, Shura had not only witnessed some of the most destitute places in the world, she had had front row seats to their creation, which was a much stranger and more moving experience. It was one thing to witness a slum, it was another thing entirely to see a beautiful city reduced to one right in front of your eyes.

  Vienna still troubles you.

  “I spent many wonderful years there. It will always be my favorite city.”

  I remember your delight at being stationed there when the war broke out.

  “For my personal knowledge of the city. Only to see it shattered and reduced to rubble in the ensuing months.” Shura couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her thoughts.

  Shura had endured some of the worst miseries humanity had to offer at that front. She had razed entire villages – the elderly, women, children – when it was discovered that they had poisoned her division’s food supply. She had slept in blood-soaked clothes for months on end during the attack on Austria, when their supply lines had been cut off, and the enemy dominated the skies. She had eaten horses and dogs alongside her troops during the retreat east through Warsaw. She had cradled the blank-staring heads of her soldiers in her hands as she put them out of their pain.

  She looked out the window as the car took her from the uneven and sagging neighborhood to one that all of a sudden looked completely symmetrical and orderly, as if the builders had decided to erect a city from LEGO blocks. Gone was her view of bent and misshapen buildings, awkward patchwork walls, and chaotic kaleidoscope of broken structures. Now, the buildings were stacked together with straight lines and perfect corners. Although the area was still a wretched slum, Shura approved of this novel use of old shipping containers.

  “We’re here.” Surrett, sitting next to her, pointed to the side as the car turned off a main street. “Please wait inside while I have the police detail clear out the riffraff.”

  Right away, Shura could tell why the Genjix chose this area for the build site. It was embedded within a heavy residential area, limiting the enemy’s options of bombing it. The Gulf of Khambhat also made the region easily defensible. The Tapi River provided a natural breakpoint to regulate the water flow for cooling the bio generators while at the same time allowing supplies to be easily brought in by ocean.

  Not only that, Surat is in an optimal geographical position relative to the moon’s trajectory. This is the ideal location to build the Bio Comm Array facility. Now if only they can complete the project.

  “That’s what we’re here for. To save the day.”

  Shura studied the fortified perimeter gates as they passed through the entrance. Many of the Bio Comm A
rray structures on the inside were pushing up against the fence while the slums on the outside were threatening to break in. A person could almost jump between roofs. Something had to be done about that.

  The site needs another four thousand square meters, conservatively, as well as straight access to the ocean. That strip of residential land between the site and the docks is unacceptable.

  “Among other things.”

  She looked back at the hundreds of miserable people milling about the streets outside the fence. The number of people in that kilometer of land, called the Dumas neighborhood, could be in the thousands.

  The car came to a halt, and for the next hour, Surrett showed her, a little too proudly perhaps, the mostly-finished construction site. The work was good for the most part. The site was clean and orderly. Right away, Shura understood what sort of manager Surrett was. The man was a born organizer. He was meticulous to a fault, to the point where he didn’t seem to know when to leave the extraneous details.

  The minister painstakingly went over every single location of the site, leading her through the primary Array facility, walking her down the desalination pipes, and even taking her to the proposed Quasing housing facilities where the thousands of newborns were to be kept.

  Shura stared at the patch of empty earth. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  I can see why no other Quasing would choose him as a vessel. I am irritated just listening to him. If he were my vessel, I would order him to commit suicide by the end of the first day.

  “You are rather fortunate to have my charming company then, Tabs.”

  Fortunate for you, perhaps. Else I would just have you drowned. Tell this human to move on past these frivolous details and to the important matters.

  “I can read the blueprints later. Let’s get to the problems at hand,” said Shura, cutting Surrett off.

  The minister nodded and signaled for the inspector of the police guarding them. “Inspector Manu, please clear a path for us to the street.”

  Shura watched as the police officers waded into the crowds with sticks in their hands. The people obviously knew who Surrett was, the looks on their faces clear as he walked among them. Everywhere they had gone so far today required the dozen burly uniformed men to constantly push back the crowds. These were people with little love or respect for the police. No matter how brutal these uniformed men were with their sticks, the rabble didn’t seem to learn and kept filling in the spaces.

  Every once in a while, a child would break through, only to get cuffed to the ground before reaching them. Shura wasn’t sure how long this tension had gone on between the minister and the community, but it felt like a familiar thing.

  Surrett looked at her apologetically. “As you can see, the local community has resisted us every step of the way. We need to clear approximately six city blocks for the build site to reach the docks. That’s roughly two hundred structures, maybe eighteen hundred containers. We’ve offered them more than fair reimbursement, but most have turned us down. They are making things difficult.”

  A few beggars cannot stand in the way of an important Genjix project. Is this man feckless?

  “Send these twelve police in with their bats and just root them out,” Shura shrugged. “It’s not like any of this will be missed.”

  “A few poor people are no problem,” Surrett said hastily. “However, to clear the space for the site will require us relocating thousands of people living in those containers. This particular slum, known as Crate Town, is also notoriously tribal and insular when it comes to outsiders. Three of the community leaders who own stakes in this disputed area have been particularly vocal against the proposal and have turned the community against their own government. Now, we face opposition not only from those we need to move, but from the entire slum. That numbers in the hundreds of thousands.”

  Cut off the head and the snake will fall.

  “Who are these three leaders?” Shura asked.

  “Faiz the trader, Indu the monk, and Mogg the gangster.”

  The merchant, the priest, and the criminal. What sort of bad joke is this?

  “Seems the joke is on us since we have to deal with it.”

  Shura said aloud to Surrett, “Why single out those three?”

  “Faiz owns large swathes of the Dumas properties. Mogg is head of the dockworkers’ union and also runs a large racketeering ring on the west side of Crate Town. Indu heads the temple in the heart of that neighborhood. They’re the ones with the most to lose if we pave over it and turn it into a giant military facility.”

  “Can’t you just arrest them for sedition?”

  “Using force in this wasteland is like striking sand,” Surrett said. “No matter how hard and how many times you hit them, little happens.”

  Shura sighed. “Very well. Let’s go see one of them.”

  “Now?”

  “Right this moment. I don’t have time to waste, and neither does this project.”

  Shura followed Surrett and Manu as they carved a path through the crowded street. She masked her irritation, but inside she raged a little. This all seemed so petty. She was used to dealing with world leaders and princes and presidents, not poor community leaders and business owners wallowing in dirt. The fact that the minister had not simply paved over these slums by now was just another indication that he didn’t have the right mental makeup to climb any higher.

  Do not judge so quickly. The young man is looking out for his future. Evicting thousands of residents makes for a poor public relations headline when one aspires to be prime minister.

  “Genjix goals should trump personal ambition.”

  One could argue that elevating one of ours to become the leader of India aligns with our goals.

  “Not if it delays a project as important as the Bio Comm Array. Besides, we need someone in charge who can establish permanent Genjix authority in this country, not compromise and get voted out in the next election cycle.”

  They entered a building much larger than the ones surrounding it, measuring nine containers wide and stacked four tall – a veritable mansion. It was also one of the few buildings on the block that had a yard and was not designed as shared housing. They entered a spacious and surprisingly well-decorated home with furnishings Shura would have expected from someone living in upper-middle class homes in Moscow. The well-kept and clean interior starkly contrasted with the rusted raw industrial container walls outside.

  The hair on the back of Shura’s neck pricked up. The home had air conditioning, running water, electricity, and – she checked the frequency signals on her watch – a strong network connection. This was hardly something she thought she’d see here in the slum. She revised her thoughts of Crate Town. She had assumed the homes here were temporary camps or shacks, but these were actually modular residences and would be much more difficult to uproot than originally thought.

  This Faiz may be a difficult and expensive person to buy off.

  “He is still a businessman, and in the end, he will only care about how much he can profit from this transaction. Let’s go feed him a carrot.”

  Faiz was reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in the area. The people around him surely weren’t living quite so richly. However, no matter how wealthy a man he was in Crate Town, he was still only a man living in a slum. He couldn’t be that well off.

  Tabs wasn’t wrong though. The cost of buying wealth was an exponential equation. It wasn’t that Shura didn’t have the funds; she could easily buy off one man with Genjix money, but it would reflect poorly upon her to be so wasteful.

  The Genjix prided themselves on efficiency, to accomplish as much as possible with the least amount of resources. It was also one thing to buy off one man, it would be another to buy off thousands, and once everyone else saw how much it cost to buy one, the price would only go up from there.

  Shura noted the liveried servants, armed with machetes, doubling as bodyguards. One of the servants, more ornately dressed than the ot
hers, led them upstairs to the fourth floor.

  There is not a firearm in sight.

  “Guns shouldn’t be hard to procure in this area. We are not too far from the front lines of a recently fought war, after all.”

  A taboo or some local custom, perhaps.

  The servant escorted them to the end of the hallway where two guards stood watch in front of an elegantly carved wooden door. One of the guards swung the door open and they entered an office that Shura had to admit seemed positively rich. A handsome, well-dressed man with a head of gray hair and a neatly-trimmed beard sat behind an expansive wooden table that was far too large to have fit through the door. The top of the table was barren, except for an ashtray with a cigar burning inside.

  Four lights from each corner of the ceiling covered every centimeter of the table. Faiz was making a point. The entire room was set up to accentuate the table and to point out that he was wealthy enough to either build a room around it or that he had cut out part of the house to crane the table in.

  “Master Faiz,” the servant bowed nearly to his knees, “your guests are here.”

  Faiz stood up. “Welcome, Minister Kapoor, my friend. So good of you to come see me so soon after our last discussion. I hope you’re not wasting your time again. Every week you come to speak with me as if you were asking for my daughter’s hand in marriage, and every week I send you off disappointed. May I offer you tea, coffee?”

  Surrett shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.” He sat down in the chair opposite Faiz while Shura leaned against the wall next to the door. She was content to let the minister take the lead. It afforded her more opportunities to study the negotiations and probe for an opening.

  Faiz looked past Surrett’s shoulder at her and leered. “Who is your friend? She is quite a knockout.”

  Shura decided to play along. She had noticed the half dozen Hindu idols and paintings dotting the walls on the way up here. She clasped her palms together and bowed. “Namaskaara. Kaise hain aap?”