The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 15

Eventually Ellie ran out of things to poke at. The tagging on the maps was fairly minimal this far from anywhere. She had overlays for roads, and wireless network coverage, and that was about it. She panned around. On the visual map could see several large clusters of buildings near a road and quite close to the wall, on the Měi-guó side, and presumably in the direction they would be heading. When she tapped for more information, nothing came up to explain what they were.

“Are these refugee camps?” she said, to the room in general.

“Transient debtor camps,” Jackson said, which was almost the same thing, but not quite.

Not quite because it meant the people living there would be poorer and more desperate than actual refugees. Transient debtors couldn’t work for pay, not as part of the legal economy, because they weren’t yet registered in the local area, so their cost-of-living adjustments hadn’t been calculated. Anything they earned would be garnished in full, right away, and transferred to their creditors wherever they had come from. Most of them tried to register, of course, but getting registered was the complicated tangle of bureaucracy that any social service provision was designed to be. No local authority wanted registered debtors on their books, because of the administrative paperwork that went with them, and that was especially so this close to the wall, where there were millions of them wandering around.

It wasn’t a pleasant life, and Ellie felt a little sorry for the debtors, but they weren’t really her problem. She felt sorry for the stone-age hajjis in the Afghanistan, too, but it didn’t stop her operating around and through them when she had to. She looked at the map a little more carefully, remembering where the greatest concentrations of debtors were, and decided that whatever else she and Sameh did, they would avoid those camps.

She went back to looking at the video feeds, especially that of the roads, trying to guess how good the transport net was from how rough the road surface looked in the video. Probably not very good, she decided. It might not have been repaired in quite a while. Like Afghanistan, she thought, which meant travelling slowly, and very uncomfortably, anywhere they went.

She made a few notes, and glanced up at Jackson. He’d noticed her typing and handed her a tablet to transfer the file to. She flicked the file over, and put the tablet in her trousers pocket, and then she looked around. The room still wasn’t full. Sameh was just sitting there, glaring at people fairly randomly. Jackson was still standing near Ellie. A few other people were standing around the walls, take their cue from Jackson, presumably, and not sitting down. A single assistant was doing meeting-prep things, linking personal tablets to the main wallscreens, and setting out loaner note-taking tablets and drinking water and glasses.

The assistant put a glass down beside Ellie, and handed one to Sameh.

Ellie looked at the glass, surprised. She didn’t quite know what to say. They really had all gone pretty native here, she thought. An actual water glass was getting a little bit uncivilized.

Jackson appeared beside her. He must have seen Ellie’s face, and the glass, and realized what she was thinking. He was quick. Ellie really only had time to be surprised before Jackson had stepped forward, and taken the glass away, and replaced it with a bottle, sealed and clean.

Ellie opened the bottle, and said, “Thank you,” to Jackson.

The assistant looked embarrassed. Jackson didn’t, Ellie noticed. He just looked pleased with himself. Which was good, she supposed, for his morale and operational effectiveness and everything. She was empowering the in-theatre local commander who she might be depending on later, which was probably something it said to do in some kind of manual or another which she hadn’t read.

Ellie sipped water from the bottle. She glanced around and saw the room was finally filling up.

She also saw that Sameh had kept hold of the glass the assistant had given her, despite Jackson placing a water bottle beside her elbow. Sameh waited until Ellie was looking at her, and then drunk from the glass, quite deliberately. She drink, and then grinned, waiting for some reaction.

“I’m not kissing you until you wash your mouth,” Ellie said quietly.

“I know,” Sameh said, smugly, and sipped again.

A few more people came into the room.

“I think we’re ready,” Jackson said to Ellie.

Ellie ignored him, just because. She kept them all waiting for a few more moments, while she looked at nothing particular on the map. To keep Jackson from getting too self-satisfied and overconfident, and also so she could feel important for just a little longer. She was enjoying feeling special.

“All right,” she said, when she felt like she’d made them all wait long enough. “Let’s start.”

She looked up at Sameh, who was grinning, and obviously trying not to laugh. Sameh knew exactly what Ellie had just been doing, but seemed to find it endearing.

Ellie didn’t care. If you couldn’t have fun doing a job like this, you were lost. Utterly lost.

She grinned back.