The Coalition Man by Alec Saracen

Author:Alec Saracen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2017-03-28T06:00:00+00:00

*

They met Thier in a small shopping complex close to downtown Landing, in one of the city's more affluent areas. That hadn't saved it completely. Though the tanks and armoured police vehicles were mostly confined to the chaotic iris of blocks around the pupil of the evacuation towers, signs of unrest were everywhere as they bowled up deserted streets. Windows were smashed or, where the material was higher-tech, dented. Occasional cars were burnt out. Paint, regular and smart, was scrawled across walls, spelling out anti-government and pro-independence slogans where legible. Discarded signs, cans, spent gas canisters, torn clothing, and other debris of the protests littered the streets, crunching beneath the wheels of the car.

Zhai still liked it better than Macard. At least it felt like a real city, albeit one in the grip of a terrible fever. There was an organic quality to it which Macard was sorely lacking. Everything about the capital seemed to be automated, right down to the plastic people who breezed about on optimised pedestrian routes and through scientifically perfect malls. Landing, meanwhile, was clumsily laid out, dirty even at the best of times, and full of people who – for better or for worse – acted like real, irrational, emotional, imperfect human beings.

Which, of course, was why the city was tearing itself to pieces. The government had made its decision long ago. Macard was the Tor they wanted, and Landing was the Tor they'd rather forget. The problem was that Landing had no intention of quietly fading away. All the government had managed to do was hem in an enormous enclave of abandoned, resentful people, kept in check only by the inescapable oppression of the Alliance. And when the Alliance disappears overnight...

If it came to civil war, Zhai thought darkly, the battlefield would be the grassy plains between Macard and Landing. Right now, he could see no way forward without bloodshed. Whoever had ordered the ham-fisted crackdown on the protests in Landing had locked in the course. It was an exercise in damage limitation now.

They parked in an underground lot beneath the shopping complex, in the exact space Thier's people had picked. The lot was empty save for them and a few plastic carts. The complex was closed until further notice. Nothing was running in Landing at the moment.

Part of Zhai suspected that Thier wouldn't come. Grey Hawk had been right: the rational response to Zhai's information – which, judging by the long silence on the other end of the line after he'd identified ResTore's ostensible headquarters, was accurate – would be to meet him. Zhai knew, however, that rationality was under ration in Landing. It wouldn't have surprised him in the least if Thier had strung him along to buy time to abandon his compromised sanctuary, calling Zhai's implicit bluff. If Thier didn't show, Zhai had no intention of helping Chang find him, but Thier didn't know that. He could only guess.

There was another rational option, of course. Thier could have agreed to the meeting to lure Zhai into a secluded, confined place, one he wouldn't leave alive.

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