To Do or Die (A Jump Universe Novel) Read online

  Beyond the planned zone was a hodgepodge of roads, at different angles, with different widths and at different levels of upkeep ranging from poor to nonexistent. That was where the industry and its workers lived. That was where the kids guided Ruth after she took them through a drive-through and fed them lunch.

  Twice.

  “Don’t eat so much you make yourself sick,” Ruth said in her mother’s voice, startling herself and the kids . . . for different reasons.

  “You can eat too much?” the boy said, raw disbelief competing for room on his face with dripping ketchup, which he’d been delighted to learn came at no extra charge.

  “Yes,” Ruth said, checking the tone of her voice and wondering why she was being the mommy to these kids.

  The two kids exchanged looks, silent communication that Ruth suspected was nine-tenths disbelief and one-tenth dismay.

  Before they could say anything further, Ruth asked the computer to show them where the General Fusion Inc. plant was located. The boy helped her follow the directions. In fifteen minutes, after only three wrong turns, Ruth was slowly driving by the front gate.

  There were a dozen lunch trucks parked on the dusty field in front of the factory. A profusion of smells wafted from them, mixed into an eclectic potpourri that reminded Ruth of a Saturday afternoon at the annual farmer’s fair as the women competed with each other for the ribbons.

  Ruth smiled at the pleasant memories.

  Then a fight broke out on the hard-packed dirt field.

  There were shouts in languages that Ruth didn’t understand. A circle formed as two men threw spirited, if wild, punches at each other.

  Guards in blue uniforms sauntered from the factory gate toward the fight with no urgency until several people along the periphery started swinging at each other.

  Then, whistles blowing, the blues trotted forward, clubs up to wail on any and all, irrespective of their belligerence.

  Brother eagerly watched. “Fights don’t usually break out until quitting time. Us kids will hang around the factories, seeing if anyone needs help home. You can make a nickel if your guy is really beat-up.”

  The kid swallowed his excitement, aware he’d given away the local going rate of help.

  Ruth continued her slow drive by the plant, turning left to follow its northern side. The fight broke up, and men headed back to work in ragged clumps. There were shouts between groups, and hand gestures that Ruth expected were obscene but she was unfamiliar with.

  When one of the blues took an interest in Ruth’s slow-moving car, she accelerated, took the first right away from the plant, and asked for directions from the computer to Consolidated Electric LLC’s plant.

  It had the same dusty foreyard. Peeling paint and broken windows were the only break in the large, dreary factory walls.

  “People come to work there day after day,” Ruth breathed, appalled.

  “Only if your old man has a job there. You got to have family ties to get a good job,” Brother informed her with bleak innocence.

  “Can you get fired for fighting?”

  “You can,” Brother said.

  “But the one you kept helping home, last year,” Sister piped in. “He’s a foreman now, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Brother agreed. “Omar did get the foreman’s job. He doesn’t fight anymore,” the kid said, probably mourning his lost nickels.

  “Why were they fighting?” Ruth muttered, half to herself.

  “Maybe one of the right-handers said something about a left-hander’s wife or daughter. Maybe one of the scrapers crossed the line that morning. Who knows? They fight, the blues watch, then they break it up,” Brother said with a shrug.

  Ruth had more questions but doubted that her diminutive informants had the knowledge or the wherewithal to answer them. Drives by several more dilapidated factories showed her nothing new.

  The kids knew of no place with green stuff growing around it. Ruth could easily believe that. She’d never seen a place so gray, dreary, and drab. Admittedly, Savannah was only her sixth planet, but she had to wonder what it was like when the rainy season came, and the dirt turned to mud.

  When she asked, the kids just shivered.

  About midafternoon, Ruth noticed definite signs of the fidgets in the kids. “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  “If we don’t get in line early, we won’t get a bed at the mission,” Brother explained, then rushed on. “It’s okay if we don’t. It’s nice, and we can sleep outside. It’s just, if we’re sleeping someplace and the big kids find us, they’ll twist us for most of what you pay us. That’s all,” he finished with resignation.

  Ruth tried to flash Brother an understanding smile even as her heart felt ripped in half.

  “I’ve seen about all I need for today. Where’s the mission? I can drop you off there and pick you up tomorrow. No need for you two to dodge the Bear again.”

  Brother stared at her in wide-eyed amazement.

  Sister hopped up and down on the backseat. “Would you? Could you?”

  “Shush, Tiny,” Brother said, trying to draw himself up to man height. “I’d really like that a lot,” he said studiously. “You don’t have to. We can walk there from here.”

  “Not before dark,” Sis corrected, but in a whisper.

  Brother threw her a quick scowl, and she fell silent.

  “Consider it part of your pay,” Ruth said, then realized the kids might think they were losing today’s two dollars. She added, “Along with the eight quarters I’ve got for you.”

  The children’s faces lit up like a morning sunrise. Tiny even managed a smile.

  Brother, of course, was too much the man to let himself go that far.

  No surprise, the mission was not in the computer’s memory.

  The kids told her the nearest factory, then guided her along a twisting maze of streets and alleys that left Ruth praying her car’s GPS unit was in good shape.

  She’d hate to have to activate her emergency beacon.

  The thought of sitting here in an alley while people squeezed around her car, of her talking into her bra, asking Trouble to locate her and give her a heading for the embassy, was too embarrassing to contemplate.

  Brother finally pointed her up a middling narrow street bordered by a mix of multistoried stone, stucco, and wooden buildings that would have been the dismay of even Hurtford Corner’s libertarian zoning codes. Only one building among them showed any attention to its paint in the recent eon, a brown-painted three-story whose green metal roof seemed to have been appended as an afterthought. It angled off to the right as if it might slide in that direction at any moment.

  Then again, none of the buildings on the street looked any too secure on their foundations.

  However, while the rest huddled alone where they had been shoehorned into the block, unnoticed by passing humans, the brown one had a line of about a dozen people crouching in front of its door.

  “Good,” Sis cried. “We’re early.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brother apologized, “you never know when the line will start. If you want, Sis can hold our place, and I can show you around some more.”

  “I’ve seen enough for today,” Ruth assured him, slipping eight Earth quarters across to him, keeping them out of sight of anyone passing by. It would be a shame to have the poor kid murdered for a dollar or two. “Who runs this place?”

  “Major Barbara,” Brother answered, getting out and helping Sis from the backseat.

  “I’d like to meet her,” Ruth said, getting out herself.

  The heat, dust, and stink assaulted her immediately.

  Ruth had slopped pigs on hot summer days. Those were honest smells. This was . . . the stink of poverty and squalor and hopelessness. It bowled Ruth over with a power that sapped her, leaving her in its malaise by the second breath.

  “I think Major wants to see you,” Brother said. “Here she comes.”

  Ruth turned toward the brown building. A woman in a blue blouse and skirt
, red piping along its edges, advanced toward Ruth. In the last month, she’d been marched on by Marines, Navy, and the best of Wardhaven’s Guard. There was none of the military pacing in “Major” Barbara’s walk . . . just the power.

  Unconsciously, Ruth stiffened her back as she would to face Trouble in full kit or Izzy at full sail.

  “I want to talk to you,” the woman said. “Will you walk with me?”

  “Yes,” came immediately to Ruth’s lips.

  “Someone will have to watch her car,” Brother piped up.

  “Mouse, get Alice Blue Bonnet,” the woman snapped without looking back. Brother . . . no, Mouse . . . ran off.

  The woman strode right by Ruth without slowing.

  Ruth whirled on her heel and followed her quickly down the street until it rounded a block. Only then did the woman turn to face Ruth.

  “I am known around here as Major Barbara. You’re flashing a lot of money at Mouse and Tiny. What are you setting them up for?”

  “Two dollars is not a lot of money,” Ruth defended her charity.

  “It is for those poor kids. If virgins are what you’re after, it’s too late. Neither of those kids are. Tiny’s rapist didn’t leave much of her behind, but if you intend to use her, I will resist you with all the power at my disposal.”

  Ruth had watched one evening when Pa and the boys found a rat’s nest in the barn. The mother had fought for her young with a blind courage that left Pa shaking his head and Brother almost willing to let them run loose. This was what Ruth saw in Major Barbara’s eyes—defiance in the face of sure defeat.

  Ruth took a deep breath. She swallowed, trying to rid herself of the sick taste Major Barbara’s accusations left in her mouth. She rolled her shoulder, as if to slough off hopelessness bad as any that had sapped her during her marriage to her first husband, Mordy.

  “Major, I am what I told the kids. I manage a farm aboard a Humanity cruiser in orbit. I’m looking for better tanks, piping, seed, and software. I’m married to a Marine at the embassy, and he’s all I ever dreamed of coming home to. Mouse and Tiny are as safe with me as I hope my own kids will be when I have them.”

  Ruth studied the woman’s reaction. Barbara’s face was lined with care, her brown hair just starting to show gray. She wore no makeup. The face was honest, plain, and, as determination marched off it, a kind of open optimism seemed to come to the fore.

  “Now, if you’ve got a second, that café across the way seems to have just brewed up a new pot of coffee. Can I buy you a cup?”

  “You work on a Navy cruiser, growing food?”

  “The best fruits and vegetables,” Ruth said, pointing the way to the café. Barbara took up the offer and started across the street.

  “Why put a farm on a warship?”

  “Some Navy reg about assuring the fruits and vegetables are disease-free. Or so I’m told.”

  “Or to keep hard Earth currency away from the poor local farmers,” Barbara breathed. “They have it tough enough as it is, getting hard money to pay their debts. Now it will be tougher.”

  Ruth had no answer to that. She took a table well into the shadows of the café’s open room. Here, she had a good view of other customers and anyone walking by; she ordered two cups of coffee. The waiter recognized Barbara and seemed happy to serve her.

  “Was your ship one of the first to get a farm?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “The captain figured if I was fool enough to fall in love with a Marine, I was fool enough to run a farm on her ship.”

  “Yes.” Barbara nodded. “You said you were married to a Marine. And now you are on Savannah, a few weeks before the coming elections and asking street kids to show you around. Madame farmer, Marine’s wife, what are you up to?”

  That knocked Ruth back. Was her cover that thin? Or did this woman, dedicated to the poor, have eyes that saw more than most and a brain that did a better analysis than most of the intel types Ruth had met?

  Ruth weighed all the possibilities and tossed the dice.

  “I’m like lots of people, just trying to figure out how things work. Like today, passing by the General Fusion plant at lunch, I saw two men start slugging it out. Mouse told me it might be because a right-hander said something a left-hander didn’t like, or maybe a scraper. What was Mouse telling me?”

  Barbara glanced down the street at her mission. “The line’s getting long early. I’ll need to get back to oversee supper. That’s what we offer them: a meal, a half hour of chapel, and a bed for the night. If I’m there, some of the more distressed folks stay calmer.”

  Ruth held her coffee cup with both hands, took a small sip, and spoke from behind it. “I imagine they find you a mothering influence. Soothing.”

  “Many of the worst cases hate their mothers, and for good cause.”

  “And you are dodging my question,” Ruth pointed out.

  “You’ve got the entire embassy staff to answer your questions. Why me?”

  “I’ve asked them. What they can, they answer. Like the senior political officer has signed off on a request to have the civil rights people investigate how the Central Bureau of Investigations works on Savannah.” There, Ruth provided some trading stock. She waited to see what the other would offer in return.

  Major Barbara snorted. “This election, probably the next one, too, will be long gone before anything comes of that.”

  “Probably. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out what I can, and I doubt the embassy staff speaks the same language as the kids. To the staff, they’re police out here. To the kids, they’re black boots or blues or crushers.”

  Ruth shrugged. “I doubt anyone in the embassy knows what a left-hander is.”

  “They know what they are. They just don’t know them the way the kids do. The view from the sewer is quite different. Left-handers are usually Croats, though they could be French Catholics as well. Those that make the sign of the cross going to the left shoulder first. Not like the Orthodox, who go to the right shoulder first. Like a Serb. Scrapers are those of the Islamic faith among us who bow toward Mecca when they pray.” Barbara shook her head.

  “Not an easy thing when you consider that as our planet rotates, the direction to Mecca changes. Praise the Lord that someone came up with a single direction for those poor people.” Barbara shook herself. “But you aren’t interested in the fine points of religion.”

  Ruth frowned. “On Hurtford Corner, we had Moslems, Jews, and several flavors of Christian. Even Wiccan. They weren’t killing each other. There wasn’t much Earth history in my education, but I seem to recall that even back in the Balkans, they’ve quit killing each other. Bad for the tourist business or something.”

  “But it’s good for business, here,” Barbara snapped, then went on more slowly.

  “In a plant, you have different shops doing different things. You have different line gangs doing their work, but not actually having to talk to each other . . . to get the job done. Back on Earth, when these different shops and line crews started talking, they discovered they had a lot in common. That’s what workers need if they’re going to organize and face managers with a united front. You’ve never been around unions, have you?”

  “My pa was a farmer. I never heard of unions until one of my ex-Navy farmhands asked if he could organize the farm two weeks ago. ‘Nothing against you and what you’re doing, ma’am,’ he told me, but his dad was a union man and he feels safer with a union rep talking to management. Me, a manager,” Ruth squeaked.

  “My father was the last union organizer anyone dared send to Savannah,” Barbara said. “When he disappeared, I asked the Salvation Army to send me here. Savannah is not a sought-after assignment even in the Army of the Lord. I found my dad’s notes in a locker at the spaceport. He’d sent me the key.

  “A hundred years ago, when they set up this planet, they hired on folks who couldn’t speak the same languages. Who hated each other’s guts and had been killing each other for five hundred years. Back on Earth, they put
an end to the killing. Here, it’s company policy to keep it going. If the chain gang hate the line crew, they’re not going to listen to anyone from there tell them they need to unite against management thugs. If the craftsmen look down on the shop-floor crews, they’re going to go home to their tiny houses and not worry about what’s going on in the slums across town. Back in the early twentieth century, they played that game on Earth.”

  Ruth sat back, trying to absorb what she’d been told. “I don’t see how . . .” she started slowly. But Major Barbara was coming out of her chair.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with you. The kids at my mission would not make good space farmers. They’d be upchucking their toenails, and I wouldn’t put it past you to just toss them out an air lock if they caused you too much trouble.”

  Ruth followed the major’s glance; a wizened man made his way slowly into the café. His twisted wooden cane made tapping noises on the tiles. The man wore sandals, but Ruth would bet the kids would call him a black boot.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Ruth shot back, as if continuing an argument. “Where I come from, a farm isn’t a farm without kids to do the small stuff. Why should I pay a man a full wage to do what a kid can do just ’cause my farm is on a starship?”

  Barbara stomped out of the café. Ruth tossed down a few coins and ran after her. “We aren’t finished! Your kids need jobs! They aren’t going to get any here. Scut work on my farm is the best they can hope for. You ought to be promising me the best you have.”

  “Enough,” Barbara said, raising her voice, and her hand. Together they walked around the corner and out of view from the café.

  “You’re a quick learner,” the church worker whispered.

  “That’s what kept me alive raising drugs on a Riddle slave plantation,” Ruth said, all cover story aside.

  Which caused Barbara to miss a step. “I heard about Riddle. I was asked to take lead in a new mission starting up there. I chose to stay here. What do you want?”

  “The idiots growing drugs on Riddle didn’t know which end of the seed to put in the ground. They didn’t develop it. Some friends of mine say it was developed here. Do you know anyplace that might be a research center for something like that?”