Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

The bar was tough as rubber but with less taste. Chewing wasn't the right way to describe eating a dole bar. It was using his teeth to bludgeon a semi-edible springboard into compliance. On the student-dole, though, you couldn't beat it.
Carefully, he wound his way through the piles of trash and electronics, past his toolkit, flash banks, and microfab, plodding towards the neon glow outside his balcony. He tried to force down the bar, but the mush was still solid. He had to chug down more soda to eat away the mass that glued shut his teeth.
Inside the net, he could have been eating a five-course meal, instead of the Authority's weaponized protein paste. Right now, he could be standing atop Everest or lying on a beach. Instead, he was stuck in this trash-heap with a heater that swerved from 'freeze' to 'boil' and windows that couldn't hold out frost nor flies.
He tilted the 'sliding' door aside and ducked onto his porch. Bereft of sunlight, the thousand-story neon barricades turned loward into acid twilight. Above and below, lights. A hundred thousand balconies popped from duracrete towers, close enough he could throw a ball to them, far enough that he never had to know them, stretching from the heat-hissing dronetown baffles to the shining, sun-kissed heights of uptown. A liftcar blasted past. It surfed a heat-mirage wave and cast a steam-cloud wake through the canyon. When it passed, that steam froze in gray slicks upon the walls and dripped towards the tiers below. Across false-bottom of the plaza, half-drowned in liftcar wash, crimson glopaint promised relief, measured in credits per hour. Firenze took a long drink and tried to remember his far-away campus green.
Online, this was a rolling park with untainted streams. He could play pickup games of flag-football with fellow students from across the world, or talk shop over a beer. He tutored from his favorite hill, sat on a stacked-stone wall, and learned in the stately cathedrals of science.
Below, a crowd had filled the plaza, their bullhorn chants turned to noise between the echoing towers, lost in the blast of steam, lights, and engines. He could see their signs, at least. The folding OLED banners and glopaint placards were as violently illuminated as the billboards on the walls. Firenze fished his hand through the canted door and snatched his binoculars from the stand. He wanted to see this.
'End the Occupation!' one sign declared. 'Democracy Now!' called a second. 'YOU are the Crisis!' screamed a third. A chant took the crowd, not that Firenze could make it out, but the call-and-response rhythm was hard to mistake, even through binocs. Firenze chewed his protein sludge and washed it down with carbonated dreck.
He scanned the crowd and looked for leaders, seeing if it was anyone he knew. Suze and Kendrix were into this shit, but there was no sign of either. No surprise, there. Kendrix did digital work only, and Suze wasn't dumb enough to get caught in the open. The protests were getting worse since Monterrey. He'd seen the leaks. The fucking army had gone full-out on their own city, burned it half-down to 'save it'. The Authority had become a sick punchline to the human joke.
A flash of blue caught in his lenses, and he traced it down the plaza. He spotted the cordon just outside the maglev station, where rows of security waited. Cops perched behind barricades. Gendarme guardsmen half-rested against armored cars. All had their lights up, but no sirens. They were tolerating the protest, for now, but stood ready with lines of shields, batons, and stingers in case this rally metastasized.
The crowd really shouldn't have bothered. That's what he'd told Suze and Kendrix when they started badgering him to 'get involved'. The Authority had been fucked the moment it opened the net. Information was a gate they could never seal, and they couldn't beat out an idea.
Not that they wouldn't try.
A new sound echoed through the canyon, one which carried over the humdrum and buzz. This wasn't a chant. Even with the bullhorns, words couldn't travel up this high. No, this was a far more primal message, and it carried just fine. It was a drum-beat, steel on duraplast, the marching thump of oncoming power. The State had had enough of this protest, and it was time to end.
The cordon split, and a phalanx passed. The guardsman in their hatches grinned. The police nodded along to the marching beat. The espos had arrived, in ranks twenty-wide and a half-dozen thick. Every one of them was covered in a black carapace. Each carried a baton and translucent shield, and they beat them with every step. It was a rhythm that took the canyon: thump, crack, thump, crack. The espos came, pitch black, with beetle-masks over their faces, and the only color on their glossy armor was the white eagle on their shields.
This was about to get ugly.
The rally fell silent. Every one of them knew what was coming. Badges on the shields meant cops, but eagles announced 'special police' - espos. The police kept the law, but espos kept order. Those weren't the same thing, even if they overlapped. Every one of those black riot troops was a party man, chosen for good standing, fitness, and character, but most importantly, with a willingness to enforce the 'common spirit of unification'. The thump-strike cadence rose, and the crowd began to break.
Firenze didn't blame them. It was a rule in dronetown: if you pissed off the cops, you went to jail, but if you pissed off the espos, you went there on a stretcher.
He was surprised, though. Not as many ran as used to. The crowds started sticking around after Monterrey. You'd think they'd have learned not to poke the bear. It would have been smarter to just wait it out.
One of the bullhorn leaders stepped down from her bulletin-stand perch to stand between her motley gaggle and the espo march. She had guts, Firenze had to give her