Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 5 - The Jungle of Cities
Three hundred flying cities are parked around a dying red dwarf star. Most of them can barely keep their lights on. Welcome to the Okie jungle. Think of it as a hobo camp in space, except the hobos are entire cities, and the camp rules are written by whoever has the most power to burn.
The Jungle
The cities drift in sterile orbits, dark and cold. Most can’t even afford to run their riding lights, the basic signal that says “hey, I’m here, don’t crash into me.” Power for spindizzy screens matters more than safety regulations when you’re slowly freezing to death.
But one city glows. Not from riding lights. From street lighting. This city has energy to waste and wants everyone to know it. It’s a flex. A deliberate, arrogant flex. And it sits in the best spot, closest to the dim red sun, while the weakest cities shiver eighteen astronomical units away in the outer dark.
Amalfi watches all of this from a reception hall in City Hall that almost never gets used. It was built for dealing with civilized star systems and complex diplomatic negotiations. Nobody expected to need it in a jungle. But here’s the thing. Amalfi is learning fast that a jungle has its own politics, and they’re not simple at all.
The Job Auction
An Acolyte trader appears on screen. She’s hard-eyed, dressed in old-style clothes made from real perishable materials. She’s got a development job on Hern Six. She needs six cities. Pay is per-job.
Lieutenant Lerner shows up too. Same cop whose bribe turned to worthless germanium back in the day. He threatens everyone. No disorder, no insolence, or nobody gets hired.
Then a fourth screen flickers on. The boss of the jungle. The Okie King.
The King’s voice is slow, heavy, and absolutely confident. He sets the rules. Nobody bids under sixty. Class A cities ask one hundred and twenty-four. Class B cities wait their turn. Class C cities don’t get to bid at all on the Hern Six job. Break ranks and get hurt.
And when the image clears, Amalfi gets his first look at the King. A twisted, hairless man in an ancient metal-mesh cape. He looks like he was carved from black lava. His face is scarred by cancer, the one disease even this future hasn’t beaten. He’s at least eight hundred years old. Been flying since before anyone knew how to shield spindizzy screens from cosmic radiation.
Amalfi Refuses
The bidding starts. Twenty-four Class A cities are on the call out of over three hundred. The trader picks four for standard work. Then she needs a pressure specialist and turns to the remaining cities. They all quote the King’s fixed price: one hundred and twenty-four.
Then the trader points at Amalfi. She knows his city is the biggest there, modern enough for the pressure job. She offers one hundred flat.
Amalfi says no.
She pushes. Warns him he doesn’t know what jungle life is like. Offers one hundred and twelve if he finishes fast.
Amalfi says no again. Not interested in pressure work at any price.
A desperate Class C city breaks in. Weak signal, barely audible. “We’ll take the job. We’re dying out here. Hunger, cold, thirst, disease.” The King shuts them down. Wait your turn.
Then things fall apart. The desperate city offers to go below the King’s minimum. Fifty-five. A Class A city panics and matches it. Then the outsider drops to fifty. The King threatens violence. The wage line is broken.
The trader cancels everything. No jobs for anyone today. Come back in a week.
And that’s when the shooting starts.
Chaos
Cities start moving. The big ones push outward, the desperate ones on the edges panic, and the four cities that already got hired try to push back in. Mayors scream over the comms that they didn’t break the wage line. The King’s voice roars through the noise. Lerner shouts for everyone to clear the sky.
Someone fires mesotron rifles. The tracers crackle through the battle tank display. Lerner panics and fires a Bethe blaster. It hits something far from the center of the riot. A fusion explosion. A city dies. Not one involved in the fight. Just a bystander.
Amalfi is surprised to see that Lerner is genuinely shaken by what he just did. The shot was random, a panicked reaction. Maybe there’s still something human in the cop after all.
In the chaos, Amalfi has Hazleton move their city into one of the now-empty orbits close to the red star. Slow, quiet, blending with the general movement. By the time the dust settles, they’re parked less than a million miles from the King’s own city.
“Break out a gig,” Amalfi says. “We’re going calling.”
Inside Buda-Pesht
The King’s city turns out to be ancient Budapest, a place of enormous marble government buildings and heavy, beautiful architecture. There’s a cantilever bridge spanning a wide avenue that nobody uses anymore. It’s been kept out of respect for history. Everything here has weight and age.
A conclave is happening. Okie mayors from across the jungle are arriving by aircab. The shoot-up with Lerner and the loss of jobs has made the King’s leadership look bad. Amalfi sees his opening.
Inside, a slight man with a Slavic face and sharp black eyes approaches Amalfi. This is Franz Specht, mayor of Dresden-Saxony. He liked Amalfi’s refusal to take any job during the bidding. He wants to make himself known. Just in case Amalfi needs a friend in there.
Amalfi asks why his city is nameless. Amalfi explains he keeps the name in reserve. As a weapon. Specht finds this very interesting.
Two Plans for Survival
Up in the throne room of the Hapsburgs, the King is already working the crowd. His massive voice rolls over the angry mayors like a rockslide. He’s good at this. Raw momentum, zero subtlety.
His pitch: forget the Acolytes. They’re just local bullies who get away with it because Earth isn’t watching. But Earth can’t come to you. So go to Earth. March on the home planet. Demand your rights. Send a Dirac signal to every Okie in the galaxy. A thousand cities descending on Earth, a peaceful protest. Too big to arrest individually, too visible to ignore.
Amalfi pushes to the front with Dee and Hazleton. He challenges the King out loud. “Show, or shut up.”
The King fires back. Insults Amalfi’s belly. Gets laughs. But Amalfi has heard worse. He asks the real question: more than half the cities here have outstanding Earth warrants. Are you really going to fly straight to the cops?
The King waves this off. Cops chase single cities, not mobs.
Then Amalfi gets up on the dais, sits himself down in the ancient Hapsburg throne, and makes the King look small.
His counter-plan: pool knowledge. Three hundred cities means three hundred sets of City Fathers, each loaded with centuries of specialized science. If they cross-connected all that accumulated knowledge, they’d be a thousand years ahead of everyone else in the galaxy. That’s the real commodity worth selling. Not muscle, not cheap labor. Brainwork. Pure science. The one thing machines can’t replace.
It would take two to five years. It would be brutal. But when it was done, they could name their price anywhere.
Specht backs him up from the floor. A careful, precisely worded endorsement. The crowd starts listening.
The King fights back. Who wants to sit around being scientists for five years? But the tide is shifting. Then Specht sets up the kill shot: “Before we vote, I want to know who you are.”
This is the moment. Prestige among Okies comes from time aloft and reputation. Amalfi’s city is legendary on both counts. One name would swing the vote. Hazleton is frantically signaling from the crowd. Tell them. Tell them!
Amalfi gives only his personal name. Not the city’s name.
A wave of contempt rolls through the hall.
The King grins. The vote goes forward. And it will go the King’s way.
The Deeper Game
But Amalfi didn’t come here to win the vote. Hazleton is furious. “You had two beautiful chances and you muffed them both!”
“Of course I muffed them,” Amalfi says. “I came here to muff them. I came here to dynamite them.”
He tells Hazleton and Dee to get out fast, making plenty of noise. Their noisy exit becomes a distraction. Then Amalfi himself fades into the crowd, bending his knees to reduce his height, tipping his bald head back, moving with the flow. Effectively invisible.
He finds Specht in the crowd. The Slavic mayor is disappointed Amalfi didn’t reveal the city’s name. But Amalfi gives him a riddle instead: “What city has two names twice?”
Specht’s jaw drops. He starts to say the answer and stops himself.
Now Amalfi has an ally who knows his secret. And the King, who thinks he just won, has no idea what Amalfi is actually planning.
This is what makes the jungle chapters so good. The cities are desperate, the politics are raw, and Amalfi isn’t playing the game everyone else sees. He’s playing a longer one. In a camp full of starving hobos, the man with a plan he won’t share is the most dangerous one there.
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