(eng) Patty Jansen - ISF-Allion 01 by Shifting Reality

Author:Shifting Reality [Reality, Shifting]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

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THE SUGGESTION THAT she run for council shocked Melati more than anything Uncle could have said about husbands or ISF. It was simple, he said; no one else knew the workings of the tier 1 constructs who ran the StatOp council as well as she did. No one understood ISF, the silent presence on the station. Harto would only annoy people and no one in the council would take him seriously, and meanwhile the B sector faced serious problems that should have been addressed years ago.

He was right. The elections would be held in another six months’ time and there was time to mount a campaign. Wahid might be willing to direct his support to someone who would continue his work, someone who would not upset the other council members within five minutes of entering the room.

But it would also be divisive. In all the elections, there had only been one candidate. Wahid had been re-elected unopposed since she could remember. She didn’t think there was another candidate put forward when he was first elected.

It was just not . . . proper to oppose Harto. It wasn’t something a good girl would do.

It would divide the community when they needed to be united. But if she didn’t like the path that Harto seemed to be on—and by God, she didn’t—it might be the right thing to do.

She sat at the tiny table in her living room, clutching a cup of tea. It felt like sacrilege to think about politics before the funeral had even taken place.

Her first concern now should be finding Rina’s killer. Prove the extent of the New Hyderabad mafia’s involvement in this and many other deaths of young people at the station. Prove how they bribed their way into businesses and other places where they had no business being, such as buying antiques from people and destroying the barang-barang’s system of lending each other money in the process. Sales to the mafia gave people hard credits with which they could purchase shiny off-station goods, which were more attractive than heirlooms from the home country. Yet, the credits were gone when spent, but the heirlooms could be traded in again for local goods or services. Hard credits were the domain of the business owners, mainly men. The block associations and loans of heirlooms were the domain of mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers. They would refuse to loan credits on moral grounds, or they would tell young entrepreneurs that their proposed business was too risky. So those business owners went to the mafia for money. Most businesses had debts with the mafia. The more successful ones made a lot of money. Of course they were going to support the “New Hyderabad merchants’ ” right to be at the station. That cycle had to be broken, so that people could see how Rina, and many others, mostly teenagers and women, were victims of racketeering and organised crime.

And so the issue came back to politics.

The murder may not have been political, but threads of politics were inextricably interwoven with it.

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