hours.
Her palms stung as the hot water hit them, and the muscles in her legs felt as though they were moments from cramping, but gradually the steam heat and the alcohol loosened her knots and helped push the discomfort to the back of her mind, which she was then able to turn to the task at hand. Not the wretched construction work of the clearance crew but her real reason for being in New York. 'Why, Miss Jules, I thought you might have stood me up.'
The Rhino had grabbed a table for them in a secluded corner of the hotel's dining room and was washing down the remains of a cheeseburger and fries with a bottle of beer. She didn't recognize the label and wondered if it had come from the hotel's pre-Disappearance stocks.
'What are you drinking?' she asked.
'Well, that is a sad story, Miss Jules. This here is one of the last ever bottlings from the lost and much lamented Dogfish brewery. Four times the grain, twenty times the hops, and about a hundred times better than cat's piss like Bud.'
'Rhino, I would never have taken you for a boutique beer man. It's all rather flowery and gay, isn't it?' Jules said as she pulled up a chair.
The Rhino made a show of scowling at her before he finished off the dregs of the beer in his hand.
'This here brew has such a high alcohol content that you could run your old boat off it, if they hadn't taken it from you in Sydney.'
'Don't remind me,' she said wearily. A waiter arrived, a young woman in the sharply starched blue BDUs of Schimmel's Manhattan constabulary, one of the local Manhattan militia units. The hotel, indeed the whole Green Zone, was officially the concern of New York Territorial Governor Elliott Schimmel. She took Jules's order for a T- bone and baked potato with a side of green beans after first fixing them up with drinks. Another, increasingly rare bottle of India pale ale for the Rhino and a gin and tonic for her. When the waitress had retreated, Jules leaned forward.
'We need to make our move pretty soon,' she said in a low voice. 'That attack on Kipper this afternoon, I don't like the look of that at all. It has all the hallmarks of some jumped-up gang boss staking out his turf. I fear this city is going to be a very unfriendly place to visit in the near future.'
'It's not exactly fuckin' Wally World now,' the Rhino said. 'But you're right. I checked on the Net earlier. Everyone's talking about it as a warning to Seattle to stay out of the East. Geraldo even had an interview with some Haitian toe rag running a crew out of East Quogue, who said all the pirate outfits would get together to make sure Uncle Sam kept his nose off their turf. Their fucking turf! Can you believe it?'
'Easy there, big boy,' she cautioned him, but for once he would not be talked down.
'It's easy for you, Jules. This isn't your country. It's just a place you're working. But I served twenty years to protect and defend America from exactly the sort of bottom-feeding scum suckers who've swarmed all over us since the Wave. It makes a rhino angry is all I'm saying. And an angry rhino is a dangerous thing.'
'I'm sure,' Jules said, pausing while the waitress returned with their drinks. She signed the chit that would charge the bill back to her account but didn't leave a tip. By federal law you couldn't offer a member of the militia any sort of monetary inducement. It was the woman's duty to ply Jules with gin and tonic. The lavish catering was also part of the incentive to come to New York or one of the other Declared Zones. To many it was a damned sight better than standing in line at one of the many government kitchens in Seattle waiting for a cup of thin venison chili.
'The fact remains,' she continued when they were alone again, 'that we have to get a move on. If Kipper is serious about retaking New York and settling it, there is going to be an almighty brouhaha in this place before too long. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the freebooters band together, at least temporarily, and it is almost certain that they'll call in help from their motherships and home ports. In fact,' she said, leaning forward, 'I would lay very good odds that our little holiday resort here will be targeted for a jolly good rogering by the Jolly Roger crowd in the very near future.'
The Rhino sipped his beer and nodded.
'You might well be right about that, Miss Jules. It would sort of make sense for them to hit hard before Seattle can get a grip on the city. So where's that leave us?'
Jules smiled and went quiet again as the waitress appeared with her meal. The food was all flown in from Kansas City or the West Coast and must have been hideously expensive. There weren't many working men and women in America who could afford T-bones and designer beer for dinner anymore, but everything in Manhattan's Green Zone was subsidized by the federal government, so although Jules would have to pay for the meal and the drinks, it was a nominal cost.
'We need to be ready,' she said. 'When the opportunity arises, we have to go without hesitation. But if nothing does arise in the next few days, I think we have to make our own chances.'
Jules casually took in the dining room. It was fast filling up with workers from their crew and the other two that had been clearing the main arterial roads at the lower end of the island. The room was noisier, rowdier for sure than it would have been back in the day. Most of these men and women were veterans of working the Declared Zones, and they had the hard-bitten, chewed-off look of frontier types. They were coining it, to be sure, but there was no old money style and grace about them, none of the reserve with which she was so familiar from her childhood.
A booth full of roughnecks started a drinking game as they waited for their meals to arrive. Ryan and Manny and some of the younger hands from their crew had colonized another three tables nearby and pushed them together and were raucously playing some sort of networked game on half a dozen PSPs, another rare luxury item. One of the televisions above the bar played archived episodes of One Life to Live, which drew the attention of men and women alike, oddly enough. Out in the foyer of the hotel four fully armed members of Schimmel's militia prowled the carpet, occasionally disappearing out onto the street for a few minutes to consult with the private contractors.
Across from her, the Rhino had diced up his steak and potatoes like a master samurai and was inhaling the results. It was his second meal of the night. Julianne was famished after a day of extreme physical labor, but she restrained herself. For all that her father had been a fraud and a scoundrel, Lord Balwyn had instilled in her the importance of at least 'looking one's part,' and that meant not falling on one's food like a starving wolverine.
'Have you had a chance to talk to that goon Lewis yet?' she asked after thoroughly chewing and swallowing a small forkful of beef. A glass of red wine would have been nice with it, she thought idly, but she had work to do later and instead sipped at her chilled spring water, another expensive luxury.
The Rhino nodded as a fist-sized lump of food disappeared inside his maw.
Jules waited a discreet moment.
'And?'
'I asked him about the attack on Kipper. You know, everyone's asking, and Lewis does love to be the guy with the inside knowledge. Anyway, we got to talking about the plans to reclaim the city and all, and I just casual like asked him how things were going, especially up in the border zones around Central Park and the Upper East Side.'
Jules nodded at him to continue.
'He said the park itself isn't too bad. The bandits stay clear of it because they can be interdicted by missile drones so easily.'
'As could we,' she added quietly.
'Yeah… but anyway, the park is pretty much clear. A lot of midtown's not so sporty as it used to be. Mostly been picked clean the last few years. Main issue where we're headed is that a couple of the gangs did set themselves up on the park, you know, living out of the Plaza and some of the better apartments.'
'As one would,' Jules conceded.
'Verily indeed,' the Rhino quipped in a mock posh accent. 'Anyway, that area's a free fire zone now. A true no-man's-land. So it's not permanently inhabited, but it's dangerous as hell to pass through.'
Jules pushed back from her plate.
'Why didn't the air force just bomb those places if they knew there were a lot of pirate Johnnies hanging around?'
The Rhino looked momentarily discomfited.
'Coupla reasons. The president, he doesn't like to bomb his own cities and… well, there's a lot of talk that
