The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 74

Ellie glanced along the row of militia members in front of her, noticing their appearance. They didn’t look the same as the people in the nearby town. There was more hair, longer hair, and a lot of beards as well, and their clothes were different to those worn by the people in the town, and different to the loaner clothes in Joe’s bag, too. There was a lot more leather, Ellie thought, and old denim, and a lot of nano-printed icons as well. It looked to Ellie as though the militia’s clothes were meant to mark them as being apart from everyone else.

Ellie thought about that, looking at the nano-prints, studying the icons the militia was using. Icons usually explained who people thought they were. She saw eagles and flags and a symbolic outline of a woman with an odd hat. Ellie didn’t recognise any of it, but she was more familiar with MidEast terrorist iconography than the Měi-guó variations.

She was about to use her comm and ask the ops centre for more information when she realized, to her surprise, that she did actually recognise something after all. She recognised the flag, from old films she had seen. It was the old American flag which had been used before Měi-guó was Měi-guó.

In fact, now she thought about it, Ellie recognised this whole situation from old films. She had pretty much seen this moment happen in old movies a dozen times before, brave groups of the unindebted holding out against the tyranny of debtor governments. At least, in the films Ellie had seen, it had been debt-free heroes standing up against corrupt governments in the last days before the liberation of Měi-guó by the recovery corporations. Here, Ellie assumed, the meanings would be reversed, and the militia would be appropriating the same icons but making them their own.

It was an odd idea, about the movies, but Ellie quite liked it. She considered it for a moment, wondering whether that made her or the militia the side which was doing good. She stood there, looking at the flags, almost curious which she was.

“Hey,” a man in the militia group suddenly said, interrupting Ellie’s thoughts.

She looked at him.

“You can’t just come in here like this,” the man said.

Ellie looked at him, surprised. Of course she could, she wanted to say, because she had, and if they hadn’t wanted her to then they should have fortified their compound more effectively. She almost said that, but then she realized what he meant. She realized, because she’d just been thinking about terrorist icons and their meanings. One of the briefing files she’d read had said the debt-resistance militias were very passionate about the old-style American legal rights, and that the militias imagined those laws still existed, somehow, and still mattered as well, even though they didn’t and barely ever had. Those beliefs were dangerous, the file had warned. Discussion of American rights was best suppressed quickly, because it inflamed the militias, and often bystanders too, in the way that accusations of religious impropriety did in the MidEast.

“You can’t,” the man said.

“Quiet,” Ellie said to him.

“You can’t just walk in here,” the man said, beginning to make himself angry.

“Stop it,” Ellie said, firmly. “Quiet down.”

The briefing file had been right, Ellie realized, a little surprised. This was a very familiar situation. This man was like dozens she’d met in Afghanistan, scared, but hiding it with anger, working himself up, making himself outraged the way a hajji might if Ellie had been searching women or had bumped a tablet containing a religious book onto the floor. This man was just talking big, making himself feel better, but if Ellie let him keep talking, he’d talk himself into angry, and then trouble would start.

“Hey,” Ellie said, “Quiet,” but by then it was too late.