The Lucifer desk

5

Yao was shorter than he looked on trideo. He was about Pita’s height, but had broader shoulders and a thicker neck. He looked like an older version of Chen, with the same straight black hair and Asian eyecast. He wore his hair “high and tight-shaved over the ears and spiky on top. It was starting to gray a little, although he was still probably only in his mid-twenties. Life on the streets had given his eyes a hard, wary look. But he was good-looking, for an ork. His jaw was narrow and his nose straight. He wore jeans torn off at the knee and a black leather vest over a loose-fitting sweatshirt-probably to deliberately contrast with the carefully groomed reporters of the legitimate news stations.

Yao sat on the other side of a small plastic table, watching Pita scarf down her second plate of noodles. There was no way to tell whether he had anything so fancy as an cybereye cam, but there a datajack showed in his temple and a mini-radio was clipped to one earlobe. When Pita asked what it was, he told her it was a Lone Star scanner and decryption unit. “Keeps me one step ahead of the cops,” he explained, one arm draped across the back of the bench. She noticed he always kept one eye on the doorway, where his friend Anwar lounged.

The second pirate wore jeans, a muscle shirt, and cowboy boots. He leaned against a wall next to the door, one arm cradling a bulky trideo camera whose size gave it away as being more than two decades out of date-nearly an antique. He grinned at Yao and gave him a thumbs-up sign indicating that none of the Underground’s security goons were in sight.

Pita finished her noodles and drained the last of her soda. She toyed nervously with one of her chopsticks until Yao gently touched her wrist. The back of his hand was covered with a mass of spiky black hairs; he didn’t shave his hands to look morn human the way some orks did. “Well?” he asked. “Are you going to tell me something about Chen? Or do you want to soak me for another plate of noodles first?”

The chopstick in Pita’s hands snapped in two. “He’s dead,” she blurted.

“Yes?”

Pita looked up. “You knew?”

Yao shook his head. On his trideo broadcasts, he was animated and expressive, but now his face was strangely still. Only a faint wince of his eyes betrayed what he must be feeling. “I didn’t know. But I could guess. I can read people. I can see that Chen meant a lot to you.”

Pita stared at the tabletop. Its edge was scatted with cigarette bums. The brown stains reminded her of the dried blood she’d found on her jacket the morning after Chen had… After the cops had…

Tears dripped onto the bright yellow plastic. Yao reached across the table and lifted Pita’s chin with one massive hand. “What happened? How did he die? Was it a fight? An overdose? How?”

“The Star,” Pita answered. She had to swallow before she could go on. “They shot him. And two of his friends, Shaz and Mohan. We were hanging out, trying to boost a trideo feed to catch one of your broadcasts. Lone Star stopped us and-”

“And Chen pulled a weapon. Stupid fragger. You’d think he’d know better.”

“No!” Pita protested. “It wasn’t like that at all. At first all the Stars did was smash the ‘trode rig you gave him. But later, they came back in their patrol car. Shaz threw a rock at them, and they opened fire on us. But none of us had a weapon. Not in our hands. Mohan had a knife, but it was still in his pocket. The cops never even got out of their car or gave us a warning. They shot before we even had time to run.”

“But you escaped.”

Guilt washed over Pita like ice water. “Yes,” she muttered, looking down at the tabletop once more. “But I came back, later, to see if the others were all right. That’s when I saw the cops cutting them up. And writing the Humanis slogans on the wall.”

“Humanis Policiub?” Chen leaned forward, a hard glitter in his eyes. “You mean fragging cops belong to that drek-eating hate club?’ A muscle worked in his jaw. “Well, it figures. Orks represent sixteen percent of Seattle’s population, but nearly fifty per cent of the prison population is ork. Not only are we arrested and thrown in jail more often, we’re also under-represented as cops. Only one fragging per cent of the Lone Star cops patrolling Seattle are ork. Nearly eighty per cent are human. Those figures have been documented by the Orks Rights Committee. And their numbers don’t lie. Prejudice against metahumans runs long and deep in the Star. Chief London’s going to have a lot to answer for the day the coalition takes over the city. And that day is coming-soon.”

Pita was impressed by all the facts Yao had at his fingertips. He was informed. He was determined.

He stopped talking as the waitress came to clear the table. She was a pretty girl-human-a little older than Pita. But Yao looked at her with open contempt. “Wait until we’re finished eating, drekhead,” he snapped at her.

Pita pushed her bowl away. “I’m done,” she said quickly. But the waitress had already scrambled away.

Yao stood up, motioning his friend forward. He took the trideo camera from him, then spoke quietly to him. Anwar grinned, then loped out of the restaurant.

“I want you to take me to the spot where it happened,” Yao told Pita. “I’ll interview you there, on location, while Anwar monitors the uplink. We’re using a portable dish to go live. Save your story until we get there. That way it’ll sound less rehearsed. When I give you the sign, you start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out.” He smiled grimly as he motioned for Pita to follow. “This could be just the story we need to spark the uprising.”

“Uprising?” Pita echoed, trotting along behind Yao. He walked quickly, threading his way through the crowded corridors. She had to hurry to keep up.

“Look around you,” Yao said, lowering his voice. “The overcrowding, the condition of these tunnels. You don’t think we orks are going to be penned up in the Underground forever, do you? The day isn’t far off when we’ll rise up into the city and push the weaker races aside. When we’ll take what’s rightfully ours and pay the fraggers back for what happened in ‘39. The Night of Rage is going to look tame compared to what’s coming.”

“My parents told me about the Night of Rage,” Pita said. “I was only two, but Mom used to tell a funny story about how Dad made us hide in the basement, then sat at the top of the stairs with his shotgun to protect us. It wasn't until the next morning that he realized he’d forgotten to load the gun. When I was little, I didn’t understand what could have sent him into such a panic. But now I realize he was afraid of the-”

Pita stopped herself. She’d been about to say, “of the metahumaus.” Thinking back on it now, she wondered at her father’s extreme reaction. Seattle’s metahumans had responded with violence to the city’s attempt to forcibly relocate them outside of its boundaries, but that violence had been tightly focused. Their rage-and the burnings, lootings, and attacks it sparked-was triggered by a series of explosions in the warehouses being used to hold the deportees. A militant wing of the Humanis Policlub was rumored to be behind the bombings. Pita knew her father sympathized with the Humanis Policlub, but now she wondered just how deep those sympathies ran. Was her father a member of the racist group, and thus a potential target for the metahuman retaliation?

“Yeah, the Metroplex Guard were even worse than Lone Star,” Yao said, interrupting her thoughts. He glanced at Pita. “You weren’t at the warehouses? Then your family hadn’t been rounded up yet by the Guard when the trouble began.”

“Uh, no.” Pita realized that Yao assumed her entire family was ork. Given the arrogant, hostile tone he’d used when speaking to the waitress in the noodle bar, she was afraid to tell him she’d once been a member of the “weaker races” herself.

“You were lucky, then,” Yao continued. “My father died when the first explosion hit the waterfront. My mother was never the same afterward. She tried to reverse the confiscation order on our house, but the city appealed every court decision, and eventually our money ran out. After that, she didn’t have the strength to do much but sit and cry.

“Governor Schultz glosses over the whole thing now, and talks about our current ‘racial harmony.’ She seems to think the Night of Rage could never happen again.” Yao’s smile tightened. “Well, she’s soon going to find out just how wrong she is. When your interview hits the air, the sparks will fly.”