“Yes.”
Sula sat herself at the desk. “I need you to buy as much food as you can carry. Canned, dried, bottled, freeze-dried. Get the biggest sack of flour they have, and another sack of beans. Condensed milk would be good. Get Spence to help you carry it all.”
“What’s going on?” Macnamara was bewildered.
“Food rationing.”
“What?”Sula could hear the outrage in his voice as she called up a text program.
“Two reasons for it I can think of,” she said. “First, issuing everyone a ration card will be a way of reprocessing every ID on the planet…help them weed out troublemakers and saboteurs. Second…” She held up one hand and made the universal gesture of tossing a coin in her palm. “Artificial scarcities are going to make some Naxids very, very rich.”
“Damn them,” Macnamara breathed.
“We’lldo very well,” Sula pointed out. “We’ll quadruple our prices on everything on the ration—you don’t suppose they’d be good enough to rationtobacco, would you?—and we’ll make a fortune.”
“Damn them,” Macnamara said again.
Sula gave him a pointed look. “Good night,” she said. “Dad.”
He flushed and shambled to bed. Sula turned to her work.
“What if they rationalcohol ?” she said aloud as the thought struck her. There would be stills in half the bathrooms in Zanshaa, processing potatoes, taswa peels, apple cores, whatever they could find.
In the next few hours she roughed out an essay forResistance denouncing the food ration. Her previous job, before she’d volunteered to get herself killed with partisan forces, had been with the Logistics Consolidation Executive, which had been deeply involved with cataloging and deployment of resources. She knew that, as the Praxis demanded, the planet of Zanshaa was self-sufficient in foodstuffs, and that from the practical point of view of providing food to the population, the ration was nonsense. She quoted numerous statistics from memory, and was able to get the rest out of public data sources.
By the time she finished, dawn was greening in the east. She took a shower to wash the tobacco smell out of her hair and collapsed into bed just as she heard Macnamara’s alarm go off.
She rose after noon, the apartment already hot with the brilliant sun of summer. As she rubbed her swollen eyelids and blinked in the sunlight flooding the front room, she began to remember what it was like to be a clique member’s girlfriend.
And then she had another thought. Thus far Action Team 491 had been selling her own property out of the back of a truck, a business that was irregular but legal. But once the ration came into effect, selling cocoa and coffee off the ration would be against the law. The team wouldn’t just be participating in informal economic activity, they’d be committing acrime.
People who committed crimes needed protection. Casimir was going to be more necessary than ever.
“Damnit,” she said.
SIXTEEN
Macnamara failed to procure a large stash of food. Police were already in force at the market, and foodsellers had been told not to sell large quantities to any one person. He wisely decided to avoid attracting attention and bought only quantities that might be considered reasonable for a family of three.
The announcement of rationing had been made while Sula slept and the food marts were packed. Tobacco had not been included, but Sula couldn’t hope for everything. Citizens were given twenty days to report to their local police station in order to apply for a ration card. The reason given by the government for the imposition of rationing was the destruction of the ring and the decline in food imports.
The news reports announced that certain well-established Naxid clans, out of pure civic spirit, had agreed to spare the government any expense, and would instead use their own means to manage the planet’s food supplies. The Jagirin clan, whose head had been temporary interior minister during the changeover from the old government to the new, the Ummir clan, whose head happened to be the Minister of Police, the Ushgays, the Kulukrafs…people who, even if some of them hadn’t been with the rebellion from the beginning, clearly found it in their interest to support it now.
Sula reworked herResistance essay to include a list of the cooperating clans, along with a suggestion that anyone working for the ration authority was a legitimate target of war.
The Naxids, she thought, had just created a whole new class of target.
Naxids were placed in every police station to monitor the process of acquiring ration cards, and the Naxids wore the black uniform of the Legion of Diligence, the organization that investigated crimes against the Praxis. All members of the Legion had been evacuated from Zanshaa before the arrival of the Naxid fleet, so apparently the new government had reformed the Legion, probably with personnel from the Naxid police.
Anotherclass of target, Sula thought.
She then sent out the usual fifty thousand copies through the Records Office broadcast node. The next few days were spent making deliveries, arguing with restaurant and club managers about her increased prices, and watching resentment build among the city’s population. Fury against the Naxids was now quite open, and even solid, prosperous citizens felt free to vent their rage publicly.
She wondered how people like One-Step would fare at acquiring their ration card. What, for instance, would One-Step claim as an occupation?
Sula kept a watch on the death certificates filed in the Records Office and discovered that a minor member of the Ushgay clan had died in a bomb explosion, and a Naxid police officer had been run over by his own car. The death certificate gave no indication how the officer had managed this, but she decided that the next number ofResistance would claim the incident as an action of the Lord Richard Li wing of the secret army.
Sula bypassed the local police and the Legion of Diligence and acquired her team’s ration cards directly from the Records Office, splicing into the record the signatures and testaments of perfectly legitimate police officers and members of the Legion. She acquired a card for each of the team’s many backup identities and had each mailed to the communal Riverside apartment. She later changed the address in the records so it wouldn’t seem odd that so many people were sharing the same address.
She also acquired a card in the name of Michael Saltillo, the identity she’d established for Casimir. It might come in handy at some point.
Three days after the announcement about rationing, Sula was making deliveries in the High City, and called Sidney. He said that progress had been made and invited her to visit the shop.
Because she didn’t know Sidney well enough to assess whether it was safe, she left Spence and Macnamara in the truck, parked inconspicuously down the street. “If I’m ambushed,” she said, “try to pull me out. But if you can’t, make sure one of your bullets finishes me.”
Spence looked as if she weren’t listening. In Macnamara she saw horror, then acceptance. He nodded and said nothing.
This time she was able to go in the front door. The shop had been reopened, and the display cases and racks showed only weapons suitable to Naxid anatomy.
Sidney waited behind a tall ceramic desk, his mustachios newly waxed and elaborately curled. “That was fast,” he said in his ruined voice.
“Efficiency is my motto.”
From his desk, Sidney locked the front door and reprogrammed the sign out front to announce that the shop would reopen in an hour. “Come along,” he said, and took her to the back room.
The room was the same model of neatness and regularity it had been a few days earlier, though the smell of hashish was more subdued than on Sula’s first visit. On the immaculate surface of a workbench she saw a short rifle. Sidney turned on a lamp, picked it up and held it to the light.
“The Sidney Mark One, if you like,” he said. “I went for a simple firearm—nothing requiring a heavy battery pack or elaborate technology.”
Light gleamed on the rifle’s matte-black surfaces. It was obviously crude, with a stock made of pieces of carbon-fiber rod, a barrel that might have originally been a resinous pipe fitting, a receiver of metal, and iron sights.
“That was fast,” Sula said.
“Simple firearms are easy, if you don’t want elegance,” Sidney said. “It helped that the gun’s completely illegal—I didn’t have to add the unlocking code and thumbprint-recognition pad required by law. Computer-assisted lathes did the work. The hard part was the ammunition.”
He reached into a drawer, withdrew a tubelike magazine, and snapped it into place. “I wanted a traditional propellant, one that carries its own oxidant. I wanted it caseless so people wouldn’t have to worry about making cartridges.” He rooted around in the drawer and came up with some small yellow cylinders, like cigarette filters. “The propellant wasn’t hard,” he said. “It’s standard Fleet issue DD6 and will fire on a planet’s surface, in the vacuum of space, and underwater. Its ingredients are readily obtainable, and you can mix the stuff on your kitchen table and bake it in an oven.” He handed a few of the cylinders to Sula. They felt dry and grainy. She pictured grandmotherly types turning them out on cookie sheets and smiled.
“You can cast the bullets out of metal or hard plastic, then stick them to the propellant with epoxide,” Sidney said. “Unfortunately, neither bullet type will penetrate standard police armor, but they’ll be useful against softer targets.”
Sula examined the propellant cylinders again. “What do you use for a detonator?” she asked.
Sidney gave a grim smile. “I didn’t want people messing around with mercury fulminate and the like. Blow their own fingers off.”
“That’s the problem we’ve been having with our bombs.”
“Maybe I can help you with that. DD6, you see, will ignite at high temperature, so I built a standard laser-emitting diode into the breech.” A few competent movements of his hands broke down the weapon and held the part to the light. “This is the most critical piece of the gun, and it can be scavenged from practically every piece of communications equipment made. Comm units, music and video players…there’s no way the Naxids can prevent people from acquiring as many of these as they like. It will run off a little micro battery you can acquire anywhere. The operator will have to replace the diode every few hundred rounds, but it’s a quick job and you can do it in the field.”