The Churn: An Expanse Novella (Expanse 3.5)

Burton had sent Timmy to collect a debt, Timmy had killed the man instead, and Burton hadn’t cut him loose. Two points defined a line, but three defined the playing field. Burton didn’t always have need of boys like Timmy, but sometimes he did. Right now, he did.

Lydia sighed.

The churn was coming. It was the name Liev had given it, back before. All of nature had its rhythms, its booms and busts. She and Timmy and Liev and Burton were mammals, they were part of nature, and subject to its rules and whims. She had lived through perhaps three, perhaps four such catastrophes before. Enough that she knew the signs. Like a squirrel gathering food before a hard winter, Burton collected violent men before the churn. When it came, there would be blood and death and prison sentences and maybe even a curfew for a time. Men like Timmy would die by the dozen, sacrificed for things they didn’t know or understand. Maybe even some of Burton’s lieutenants would fall the way Tanner Ford had back when she’d been Liev’s lover. Or Stacey Li before him. Or Cutbreath. The history of her corrupted world echoed with the names of the dead; the expendable and the expended. If Burton had kept Timmy on, it was because he thought it was coming. And if Burton thought it was coming, it probably was.

Timmy’s breath was low and deep and regular. He sounded like a man asleep, except his eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling. Her own skin was cool now, the sweat dried or nearly so. A fly swooped through the air above them, a gray dot tracing a jagged path, turning and dodging to avoid dangers that weren’t there. She lifted her first two fingers, cocked back her thumb, and made a thin cartoon shooting sound with her teeth and tongue. The insect flew on, undisturbed by her small and violent fantasy. She turned her head to look at Timmy. His expression was blank and empty. He was still, and even in the warmth that followed orgasm, there was a tension in his body. He wasn’t a beautiful boy. He’d never be a beautiful man.

Someday, she thought, I will lose him. He will go off on some errand and he will never come back. I won’t even know what happened to him. She probed at the thought like a tongue-tip against the sore gum where a tooth has been knocked out. It hurt and hurt badly, but it hadn’t happened yet, and so she could bear it. Best to prepare herself now. Meditate upon the coming loss so that when it came, she was ready.

Timmy’s eyes clicked over toward her without his head shifting at all, without any expression coming to his face. Lydia smiled a slow, languorous smile.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

The catastrophe began four days later. Quietly, and with near-military precision, the city opened a contract with Star Helix security. Soldiers from across the globe arrived in small groups and sat through debriefings. The plan to end the criminal networks operating in Baltimore would be announced after the fact, or at least after the first wave. The thought, widely lauded by the self-congratulatory minds in administration, was to take the criminal element by surprise. In catching them flat-footed, the security teams could cripple their networks, break their power, and restore peace and the rule of law. The several unexamined assumptions in the argument remained unexamined, and the body armor and riot control weapons were distributed in perfect confidence that the enforcers would arrive unanticipated.

In fact, what Burton and Lydia knew from experience, many, many others felt by instinct. There was a discomfort in the streets and alleys, on the rooftops, and behind the locked doors. The city knew that something was near. The only surprise would be in the details.

Erich felt it like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He sat on the rotting concrete curb, drumming the fingers of his good hand against his kneecap. The street around him was the usual mix of foot traffic, bicycles, and wide blue buses. The air stank. The sewage lines this near the water were prone to failures. A few doors to the east, a group of children were playing some kind of complex game with linked headsets, their arms and legs falling into and out of phase with each other. Timmy stood on the sidewalk, squinting up into the sky. Behind them was a squatter’s camp in an old ferrocrete apartment block. In a locked room at its center, Erich’s custom deck was set up and primed, connected to the network and prepared to create a new identity from birth records to DNA matching to backdated newsfeed activity for the client, as soon as she arrived. Assuming she arrived. She was fifteen minutes late and, though they had no way to to know it, already in custody.

Timmy grunted and pointed up. Erich followed the gesture. Far above, a star burned in the vast oceanic blue, a plume of fire pushing a ship out of the atmosphere. Near the horizon, the half moon glowed pale, a network of city lights crossing the shadowy meridian.

“Transport,” Erich said. “They use mass drivers for the stuff that can take the gees.”

“I know,” Timmy said.

“Ever want to go up there?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” Erich said, staring down the street for the client. He’d seen her picture: a tall Korean woman with blue hair. He didn’t know who she’d been before, and he didn’t much care. Burton wanted her made into someone new. “Piss out the window and make everyone down here think it was raining, maybe.”

Timmy’s chuckle sounded polite.

“It’s what I’d do, if I could,” Erich said, making a swooping gesture with his good hand. Zoom. “Get up the well and out of here. Go where no one cares about who you are so long as you’re good at what you do. Seriously, it’s the wild fucking west up there. You want nineteenth-century Tombstone, Arizona, it’s alive and well on Ceres Station. From what I heard, anyway.”

“Why don’t you go, then?” Timmy said. With a different intonation, it could have been dismissive. Instead it was only a mild kind of curiosity. It was part of what Erich liked about Timmy. There was almost nothing he seemed to feel deeply.

“Starting from here? I’d never make it. I’m not even a registered birth.”

“You could tell them,” Timmy said. “People get registered all the time.”

“And then they get tracked and monitored and wind up dying on basic,” Erich said. “Anyway, no one’s taking me for a vocational. Waiting lists for that are eight, ten years long. By the time I came up, I’d have aged out.”

“Could build one, couldn’t you?” Timmy asked. “Make a new identity and put it at the front of the list?”

“Maybe,” Erich said. “If you gave me a couple years to layer it all in like I did for Burton. He can go anywhere with docs I built for him.”