The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 73

The kid swallowed, and took a step backwards. Of course he took a step backwards. This wasn’t worth dying over.

“Another,” Ellie said, without lowering her submachine gun.

He did that too, and then a third, even before she told him to.

Ellie swiveled slightly and pointed her submachine gun at the next person in the crowd. “You as well,” she said.

That man went backwards without arguing.

“All of you,” Ellie said. “Backwards.”

Now, they all moved. Now that someone else had gone first, the rest were happy to do as they were told. It was something Ellie had learned in the MidEast. When you had to control a crowd, you didn’t try to deal with it as a crowd, because a whole crowd, to the crowd, felt brave and strong and immovable in their numbers. They felt they could talk back, and argue, and so they did, and then eventually you ended up with a bloodbath, having to kill half of them just to convince the other half to do as you wished. Instead, a better way was to shift them as individuals, one person at a time, picking each out one by one, and isolating them from the rest. Isolating them, because in a situation like this, nobody spoke out for other people. As soon as a weapon was pointed at someone, everyone else just felt a guilty little shiver of relief that it wasn’t aimed them, and so as each person had a gun pointed at their face, they stopped being part of a crowd, and because simply a scared person on their own being told to do something. Suddenly it was them who was going to be hurt, not just some abstract someone in the crowd, and once they realized that, once got scared and quiet, then they would do exactly as they were told.

That was the best way shift an angry crowd without having to kill anyone, and that was what Ellie did. She made one militia member move, and then another, so then, when she told them all to move together, as a group, the crowd moved backwards without making a fuss.

“And make a line,” Ellie said. “Don’t stand behind each other I want to be able to see you all.”

They did that too, without being difficult. The situation was coming under control.

Once Ellie had the militia moved back from their weapons, and spread out so she could cover them properly, she looked at them for a moment, thinking. There were a lot of men in the group. It was mostly men, Ellie noticed. She wondered if that meant something. She hadn’t especially noticed a demographic skew in the data readouts on the map earlier, which she thought she would have seen if it was there. And if she hadn’t noticed, then the intel-analysis software ought to have drawn her attention to it. The software was usually smart enough to find patterns like that, because homogeneity in gender or ethnicity tended to imply terrorism. That neither Ellie nor the software had noticed an imbalance of men in the group implied there were actually both men and women in the compound, but that the women were all somewhere else, like inside the bunker building. The women were inside the bunker building, keeping safe, and the men were out here fighting.

That was odd, Ellie thought. It was a very strange, old-fashioned idea. It must reduce their combat effectiveness, and she wondered if they knew. It was like the MidEast all over again, she thought, but she wasn’t especially surprised. Now she was in Měi-guó, and getting used to its ways, she was starting to see that there was a lot that was like the hajjis in these people, even though she didn’t quite know why.