“Huh! You know, the old lady’s right, Big Brother.”
I knew she was. Tomorrow was never guaranteed for a Janitor.
I was in a corner of our cramped but lovely home (by which I mean the sewer), nodding along as my little sister lectured me. What else could I do? Even if that same little sister was the one who was mainly responsible for making this part of the sewer so cramped.
As a practical matter, did we really need all these calculators? (That’s what these electronic calculating machines were, right?)
The section of pipe allotted to Mariya was stuffed with machines and cables and CRT monitors. I thought she was going to give herself neck strain trying to look at that pile of screens. She couldn’t see them all at once, that was for sure, and I refused to believe she used them all to calculate at the same time. Having a bunch of calculators around didn’t actually make it that much faster to calculate things, did it?
When I asked that question once, Mariya had said sulkily, “Sure it does!” She’d basically been a kid begging her brother to get her something. But then again, I’d been a brother ready to indulge his little sister.
How many of these calculating machines had she brought in here on some pretext or other?
“You love to give women gifts, Big Brother. If someone doesn’t hold the reins on you, you’ll collapse dead in a field somewhere.”
And after all that, this was how she talked to me? Look at this room! There was hardly anywhere to walk!
There was nothing to be done at this point, though, so I leaned against the sewer wall and watched Mariya tap away at a terminal keyboard. An Elektronika MK-170 portable device it was not. That tiny little calculator was currently plugged into the case of an Elektronika MK-172.
A mess of other machines was likewise buried in the walls, some that I’d brought in, some that I hadn’t. When I say walls, I mean the ones on both sides and the far end of the room—plus, the floor didn’t look much better. There were cases piled upon cases, spiderwebs of electrical wire, and tape that seemed to run crackling through every free spot.
“I’m starting to worry you want to turn this place into the Electronic Brain Room from the Union’s Academy of Sciences,” I said. I figured the attempt to conquer the Mount El’brus of exponentially multiplying the capability of the Union’s superconducting brains must be something like this.
I looked at the humming calculating machines and CRT monitors and heaved a sigh. “Just remember to clean up one of these days. No man is gonna want…this.”
“Tsk… You’re six minutes late, comrade.”
A cluck of the tongue and a cold reminder—that was all I got. Mariya spun her chair around with a squeak so she could look at me.
“It’s all good. I ate before I came.”
“This is why I can’t stand lotharios…”
My sister probably thought she was doing a good job looking cool and collected, but I could tell at a glance that she was scowling. And probably not because of the bitterness of the coffee she was drinking from her military-issue canteen.
“Give me a sip,” I said.
“It’s dandelion,” she said.
“Sugar?” I asked.
“Substitute.” Although she added with a mild look that she didn’t dislike the stuff.
Sadly, I wasn’t in the habit of drinking substitute coffee with substitute sugar—i.e., salt.
I raised my hands in resignation. “Ladno. Fill me in on the job, comrade.”
“Don’t mind if I do. Work is glorious, comrade.” Mariya typed away at her keyboard again with obvious satisfaction at the opportunity to tweak her big brother. The tape wound along—squeak, squeak, squeak—and the terminal read it, then clacked away. Finally, after much tapping and groaning, it spit out a piece of paper that Mariya tore off in a single smooth motion.
“This request comes in from the mafia.”
“Organized crime. Right in a Janitor’s wheelhouse.”
She handed me the paper, and I looked it over. Unlike the folks from Organ, the mafia offered jobs that were short and simple. There was an address, a date, and a single typed line of text asking me to ransack the place.
“A diversion?” I asked. “They want me to make a show of roughing the place up…”
I had a feeling it was a raid of some kind. No Janitor worth his salt ever wanted the details.
I located the address on my mental map and asked the only question I was really interested in: “What’s the reward?”
Silently, Mariya held up a single finger. One bundle of rubles. Just like last time. The fact that the public administration and the mob paid the same meant that the nation was holding out on me or the mafia was feeling generous.
“You’ve got a reputation—a Janitor who’s cheap, available, and versatile. Lots of people want you, comrade.”
“Work may be glorious, but can’t we get something a little better, comrade?”
“If you don’t like it, we can try for something else.”
You couldn’t fire a gun in Moscow without hitting a top-class, highly replaceable Janitor. We were a kopeck a dozen, so to speak. The only exceptions were the real cream of the crop, like Uchitel.
I had only one thing to say. “Nah. I’ll do it.”
Staying out of danger was an ironclad rule for a Janitor, but then the work itself was dangerous. Nobody would come knocking twice on the door of someone who just stood around and bitched.
Mariya looked like she might be able to swing things for herself even if they never showed up again, but I didn’t intend to make my little sister wipe my ass.
As for the reverse—well, I wasn’t sure. It’d been all well and good when she was a little kid, but somewhere along the line she’d decided it was embarrassing.
“At least tell me about the target,” I said. “I don’t want to go charging in there uninformed.”
Whatever the case, I would have to do what I could. A few pertinent questions wouldn’t hurt.
“I took the liberty of looking into them,” Mariya replied, turning her chair around again so her back was to me and she was looking once more at the monitors. Her pale fingers danced over the keys, and the screen began to flow with green zeros and ones. Looked like something that would ruin your eyes, if you asked me. I had no idea what if anything she was getting out of it.
There was a dial tone, then a whistling screech indicating we had a connection. I knew this was communication calculations—but that was it. All I could do was stand there until Mariya told me what the message from cyberland was.
On a whim, I grabbed an electronic game sitting on a shelf. On the liquid crystal display, Captain Ilya Murometz could be seen in blurry colors, firing a gun at a bad guy. Unlike in the comics, Captain Murometz evidently died if he took two or three hits. I felt a fondness for him well up in me.
“The target is a cheap kommunalka owned by a particular organization.”
Mariya related the info to me in quick bursts in between crackles of electric noise. Her chair squeaked, and she looked at me.
I gave up acting like Captain Murometz, giving his blurry self his, uh, marching orders. There were four electronic explosions. “Residents?” I asked.
“All have the kinds of jobs you don’t see on television.”
I frowned. I knew what sort of place that was and had known since I was fifteen.
“I assume you understand what that means, Mariya,” I said.
“I do, Brother,” she said, annoyed. “The target is an enforcer.”
“Good, then.”
I mean, it wasn’t good at all. The good part was just for me.
“The exact number is speculation, but I think nine people. Of whom the number of cyborgs is, ahem, nine.”
Now, that was not good for me at all.
I repeated it slowly, hoping I had misheard. “They want a lone meatbag to go into a brothel with nine cyborgs and create a diversion?”
Mariya nodded without a word. Evidently, that was what they wanted.
“Are these people complete assholes?!”
“I’d say it’s better than open warfare with Aquarium, comrade.”
“Cheort voz’mi <Goddammit>!”
I didn’t want to say anything in front of my sister that could get me in trouble, but sometimes you just have to let it out. I learned long ago that forcing yourself to hold it in could cause bad things to happen. Lucky me.
“All they want is a diversion. Couldn’t you just get in, make a ruckus, and get out?” she asked. Her almond-shaped eyes had narrowed into a smile; it seemed to amuse her no end to see her big brother scowling so. “They’re not asking you to kill everyone in there. Frankly, they’re not expecting much.”
“I wouldn’t, either, if I were them.”
If they had been hoping for me to do that, it would’ve been as good as ordering me to my death—it would have been a trap. But the reward implied that wasn’t the case.
I guess there was always the chance that some mafia brigadier had been hitting the special sauce a little too hard—but it didn’t seem likely.
In which case, there was no other choice.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do what I can do.”
“Good. I hope you will.”
My little sister didn’t doubt me. She never had. That was why she always seemed to have me under her thumb.
Mariya started tapping away on her keyboard again. I turned and was about to leave the room when she said, “Oh, that’s right.”
“…?” I stopped with my hand on the door—a door we had somehow managed to make ourselves, of course—and turned my head to catch a glimpse of her.
“That reminds me, where are Valery and Nora?”
“He went to look at a new ride. And wasn’t he pleased as punch?”
“Hah.” Mariya let out a little sigh that seemed to indicate her distress at her younger brother’s waste of money.
I just hoped she wouldn’t give me any grief about it. I was the one who’d told him to buy the damn thing. “A good vehicle is important,” I said. “It’s how he does his job. Better to spend money on it than not.”
“Big Brother, I can’t believe you would say… Never mind.” Mariya shook her head, her black hair appearing a pale bluish-white in the light from the monitors.
I thought about my other little sister, the one with hair that same color—well, I could guess what she was up to. Knocking around somewhere.
Mariya must have had the same thought, because when she turned to me with a squeak of her chair, there was a wry smile on her face. “I guess Nora must be at the doctor’s.”
“If she is, maybe I’ll drop in for a visit while I’m out doing my research.”
“Go easy on her, Big Brother,” Mariya said.
Well, sure I would. I would never be disrespectful to Vrach.
His best customer, the little black cat, was another matter.