Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  “Be happy it’s not a sewer,” I said. He gave a short laugh which turned awkward as he realized I was serious. Xiv scrambled up the rocks and peered over.

  “Tarps,” he said.

  “Traps?” I asked.

  “No, tarps. He’s got a lot of stuff covered with tarps.”

  “Look for security systems and ways in,” I said.

  Xiv scurried over the rock and out of sight. Surveying the uninviting rocks, I picked the spot Dekker would be most able to climb and headed up it.

  “I would have thought you of all people would have questions on how I ended up here,” Dekker said.

  “I gathered it had something to do with the difficulty in putting you back together.” Though I did harbor reservations about being in the field with a former Morlock, Dekker had been more of a lackey, and had come out worse from everything. Dekker had more trouble climbing the rocks than I thought he would, growing more irritated as he pulled himself onto the ledge where I stood. The lighthouse structure had been seriously retrofitted. The original stone foundations were still there, but another story that looked like prefabricated sections clad in carbon fiber. The original tower had either been removed, or been clad in stainless steel. Along the stone foundations were indeed piles of materials covered with blue tarps staked to the ground with heavy-duty bolts. The tarps rippled in the wind. We proceeded down the rugged ground to the perimeter of the structure.

  “There’s only one door,” Xiv said. “Towards the water.”

  “There’s water all around,” Dekker said.

  Xiv pointed southeast, towards the water closest to the building. As if to emphasize the gesture, a wave crashed against the shore, sending up a spray of sea foam. I tried to mentally map the sorts of currents or winds that might hit opposite sides of an island with waves that size, but decided I didn’t know enough on the subject to work out the variables. The door Xiv had found was wood, painted red, and set into the older stone portion of the building. The lock was ancient in design and more built to keep the door closed in the wind than keep out intruders. I had it open faster than if I had the key.

  I wasn’t sure what I expected to see, but a creaky wooden staircase going down wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. I shrugged and made my way down. There was still no light, and my eye cast the stairwell in shades of green. At the bottom of the steps, the stairs emptied into a room that ran the length of the whole building. Metal struts and pistons lined the space like an inverted ribcage, bowing inward instead of out. They ran up through two stories and affixed to a composite ceiling at the top of the old stonework. The ceiling looked like the frame for a massive vehicle chassis with carbon fiber panels filling in the gaps. After a moment, I realized the pistoned struts were, in fact, legs. They were tucked under the main body of the structure and into the hollow shell of the old lighthouse building.

  “Okay, I wasn’t expecting this,” I said.

  Dekker raised his glasses, casting a pale violet glow upon the ceiling. “He’s got a big power source up there, and a bunch of computer hardware.”

  “That’s not really a surprise.” I told myself I shouldn’t be surprised that Dekker could still detect electrical signals. That sense was what led to him trespassing in Shiva’s systems. I let my eyes wander the ceiling until I spotted what I was looking for, a hatch. It was more or less above where we’d entered the lighthouse, with an old wooden ladder leaning against the wall under it. I pointed before heading over and climbing up. The lever was well labeled and gave a reassuringly solid thunk as it retracted the retaining latch. I pushed the hatch open and climbed in.

  The room was sweltering. Despite the best efforts of straining ventilators to extract the waste heat, it roasted. Having to deal with the output from two exotic looking flywheel dynamos and rack after rack after rack of gently humming computer equipment was almost impossible. A semicircle of holographic screens gave off a steady blue glow that diffused through the room amidst the myriad hues of LEDs inside the racks. The seat inside the semicircle slowly rotated to face me.

  The man in the seat had the pallor of a recluse and the overgrown beard and hair of a hermit. His gut sagged onto thighs that were not readily distinguishable from each other the way the excess flab melded together. His plaid shirt was wrinkled and stained. I could not figure out what color his trousers had originally been. The only part of him that was neatly groomed were his fingernails, probably to permit him to type more easily. He blinked at me.

  “You’re early,” he said, his voice lower pitched than I expected.

  “You were expecting me?” I asked.

  “In a few weeks. And not you exactly, but one of your type.”

  “So what are you going to do now?” I asked.

  “I am going to activate the robot’s defensive weapons systems,” he said, holding up an index finger. Then he paused and looked at the finger. I looked around the room again.

  “You don’t have any defensive weapons systems.”

  “My projections may have been a bit off.”

  “Because I’m early?”

  “Because I ran out of money.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Do you have any idea how expensive it is to get things shipped out to this island?”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m going to guess that you are Zlatan Molbrech.”

  “Easy deduction - there are not that many people on this island.”

  “Since you are very clearly in no position to cause trouble, how about you politely give us the information you have on Helen Dietrich and the Red Death?”

  Zlatan sighed. “I had it all figured out. I was going to turn my lighthouse into a giant robot, and the beacon was going to fire a giant laser, and it was going to be awesome.”

  “Giant robots are expensive.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Are you going to play nice?”

  “What’s the alternative?” Zlatan asked.

  “We neutralize you and go rooting around the computers ourselves.”

  Zlatan gasped with horror. “You can’t defile my systems! I spent ages getting them just right. No ham-handed oaf is going to rifle through them while I’m alive!”

  “There’s an easy way to make us wander off,” I said.

  Part 18

  Molbrech fidgeted as Dekker and I flanked his chair. He glanced from side to side at us. “Do you have to stand so close?”

  “There’s not exactly anywhere else to stand,” I said, knocking an elbow against the cage around the power plant next to me for emphasis.

  “Actually, I wanted to see your methodology,” Dekker said.

  “Well, the basic premise is simple,” Zlatan said. “People leave digital footprints wherever they go, especially when they actively engage with others. Each of these is a breadcrumb leading to more, and part of the overall mosaic of who they are. Collect enough of them and you can triangulate where the rest lie, eventually cracking open the whole picture. All with publicly available information left in their wake. Some people are so reckless in their social media use that they’ve built themselves a glass house. Others are more cautious, and it takes time to weave their tapestry. The implementation is where the artistry comes in.”

  “How does this give you insight into something like Community Fund shipments?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s easy. That is so blunt anyone could figure it out. For regular shipments of ordinary materials, Paragon Logistics subcontracts out and uses regular drivers. For something dangerous, they send their own truck, attach a pseudonymous driver, and file a blizzard of permit requests, environmental risk statements, and hazard insurance declarations with every petty municipality along the route. You tell everyone when, where, and who is moving something unusual. Picking out what it is from the contents of those regulatory forms
is not hard. Even when the person filing them is trying to be oblique about the nature of the cargo. The same regulatory state that gives you license to barge in here tells the world what you are doing. It’s a death by a thousand paper cuts.”

  The more Molbrech talked, the less he sounded ill at ease, and the more he sounded eager to show off how smart he believed himself to be. “I see,” I said, “So what does this method glean about the Red Death?”

  He tapped a few commands into the system in front of him, and the screens filled with text. “After taking on the name, she became very serious about trying to keep information about her identity from leaking into her online bickering. But her love of arguing led to the same patterns of information re-emerging. The problem is, unlike the Internet, she forgot about older content and archived versions. In several places, she simply deleted her old posts and renamed her account, but the underlying account ID remained unchanged. That, along with her continued behavioral profile, linked the old and new information quite definitively.”

  “So what do you know about her?”

  “She was born in the late nineties and has a trust fund in the hundreds of millions of dollars left to her by her father. When she joined in the dogpiling on Hero Watchers towards Baron Mortis, she let her mask slip. She has a deep-seated contempt for her father and lives in the area around Bilgewater and Sandy Shore. She alluded to her father being in the arms industry, accusing him of not having the courage to kill directly and being a killer by proxy. Put together, that narrows it down to two people, either Candis or Amy Amaranth, the daughters of Arthur Amaranth. Without more data points, I can’t narrow it down more, as the two have such similar profiles.”

  “How certain are you?” I asked.

  “Close to one.”

  I was unsure of what he meant for a moment, but the tone of his voice implied that it meant very confident. “And Helen Dietrich?”

  Zlatan queried his rig. The images before him shed their old data and showed very little. “Helen Dietrich does not exist.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Helen Dietrich is a birth certificate of uncertain veracity, a high school diploma of equally uncertain veracity, a non-driver’s ID, an apartment lease, and an employment record at Rockstead Penitentiary. Nothing else. No online activity. No phone. No known memberships in any organizations. No loans. No identifiable family. A nearly blank credit history. An empty framework. If I were trying to fabricate an identity with minimum effort, it would look like Helen Dietrich. She passed the security screenings by starting at the bottom with the prison and working her way up. The past service plastering over the empty void of a background. But along the way, somehow managed to leave no more of a trace than a ghost.”

  “Someone showed up for work every day for a decade and a half until wreaking havoc on Rockstead.”

  “And she was wearing the Helen Dietrich identity like a costume. This is not the sort of profile a real person leaves behind.” Zlatan gestured with fat fingers at the holographic panes hanging before him.

  “No Internet, no phone, how did she contact you?” Dekker asked.

  “Okay, ‘no activity’ was a bit of an exaggeration. But there is no other trace of the account she used, telling me she set it up exclusively for that purpose. Everything that ties back to ‘Helen Dietrich’ exists solely to meet the requirements of some external interaction. Be it for the benefit of gaining employment, or for making contact with specific individuals. I’d wager if we looked at her bank statements, they’d be just paycheck deposits and bill payments.”

  “Might I get a copy of all the information you collected about these two, and anything you gave them?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure.”

  Dekker gave me a surprised look as Molbrech saved the information to a memory stick.

  “Thank you,” I said as he handed it to me. “We’ll show ourselves out.”

  “You’re just leaving?” Zlatan asked.

  “Well, so far we don’t actually have cause to bring you in. Collecting public information isn’t illegal. Living like a hermit isn’t illegal. Liking giant robots isn’t illegal. I would think twice about turning your navigational beacon into a giant laser though.”

  “Oh,” Molbrech said. I headed back out the way we came. Dekker hurried to follow.

  “Why did you drag me out here?” he whispered.

  “In case he was less cooperative, and we needed to hunt down the information ourselves,” I said. It was technically a lie. That was Saito’s reasoning, I’d just done what I was told.

  The flight back was as uncomfortable as the flight out. I still couldn’t figure out how such a tiny airplane could stay aloft for so long. Once we were back in New Port Arthur, I let Dekker wander off. I wasn’t his keeper, and I was more interested in catching up on the status of the fugitive hunt. I used the delivery of Molbrech’s data as an excuse to head to the command center in Sterling Towers. Three large holograph tables filled the middle of the room. The walls were filled with monitors and workstations. Everyone sat around solemnly parsing information. It was more muted than I expected.

  Rookhound stood like a statue in the center of the room, the rim of his hat casting a long shadow over his face. It took a second to realize it was not Grandpa Walker in the black coat. His shoulders were too strong, the visible skin of his face was insufficiently lined. Anger welled up inside of me. Grandpa Walker had retired without so much as an announcement, or even telling his own family. It wasn’t that he had decided to retire, having a heart attack in the middle of a confrontation was ample reason to choose to hang up the mask. It was that I found out about it be seeing someone else having taken up the mantle. The new Rookhound motioned for me to come over.

  “How’s the jet lag?” he asked. The voice was familiar.

  “Nonexistent,” I said.

  “Before you flip out, this may only be a temporary arrangement,” Rookhound said.

  “What?”

  “I saw your expression when you spotted me. The old man hasn’t decided if he wants to try to soldier on. The board put him on medical leave, and he asked me to fill in for the sake of appearances.”

  “Is my poker face that bad?” I asked.

  “I’ve known you since you were born.”

  I suppressed a chuckle as I realized who it was. Uncle Kyle. Of course Grandpa Walker would keep it in the family. “How did he convince you to actually put on that suit?” I asked.

  “A speech about symbolism and continuity. And the reassuring lie that he might be taking it back.”

  “You just said it was temporary.”

  “I said it may be temporary. He won’t say what the doctors said about his heart. That means it’s not good news. I suspect he’ll formally announce it once we’ve finished bagging the fugitives.”

  “Weren’t you the one who said you’d never be Rookhound?”

  “I said a lot of things. Do you have anything useful?”

  I handed him the memory stick I got from Molbrech. He found a workstation segregated from the network by an air gap to plug it into. With no actual connection to the rest of the system, anything malicious that might have been slipped onto the drive would be limited in the damage it could do. Kyle skimmed through the data and frowned.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “Amaranth,” he said.

  “You know that name?”

  “Arthur Amaranth had been one of us before he died. He was not as good an engineer as Walter Arroyo, but he had infinitely better business sense. The Community Fund was outbid for his company by a combined offer from Ash Phoenix Arms and Falcon Cry Research. They simply had more cash on hand, and the minority shareholders wouldn’t accept a sentimental offer. That company is long gone, they gutted it for assets and intellectual property. But it built a trust fund for his girls.�
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  “I’ve never heard of either of those companies,” I said.

  “They’re actually not important at the moment. I’m more worried about the possibility that this information is accurate.”

  “How do we check on it?”

  “You don’t. Blue Streak is best positioned to verify for us.”

  Another detail clicked at the back of my mind. Amy Amaranth - Nora’s new roommate. Of course she would be in the best position to find out if either Amy or Candis were the Red Death.

  “This community is too small some times,” I said.

  “You’re not the first person to express that sentiment. You won’t be the last.”

  The border of one of the displays on the wall blinked, drawing eyes to it. I followed Kyle over, and we joined the cluster of people crowded around the video feed. It was the view from an aerial camera, possibly drone-mounted. The jittery footage was of a vacant lot strewn with glittering fragments of broken bottles and lit by a couple of flickering street lights. Combined, it made it difficult to tell what was going on. The distinctive, tusked features of Marc Steyrs were the first important detail I picked out. He was trying to decide which direction to move, his gaze darting between the red and black clad figures between him and the street, and the blue and gray clad ones behind him. ‘Little Piggy’ has never been known for his quick wits.

  “Are those the Junior Redemptioners?” Saito asked. I hadn’t seen him approach.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Who put them in the field?” Saito asked.

  “I think Arrowwarp did,” Kyle said.

  “I will have to have words with him.”

  One of the Junior Redemptioners charged Steyrs. The red jacket, black trousers, and bronze helmet told me it was Ranger Roy. There was no audio, and the silence made the crunch of their collision take on a surreal quality. Regardless of his intellectual abilities, Steyrs could soak a lot of punishment. As his boots ground across the packed earth and gravel, he delivered a headbutt to Ranger Roy’s bronze helm. The young man staggered back before being knocked flat by a two-fisted hammerblow from Steyrs. As Ranger Roy went sprawling, the other Junior Redemptioner in red loosed a pair of arrows in rapid succession. From the way Steyrs staggered with each hit, they had to be concussive shots. While they did little to slow him down, they did get Steyrs’ attention. Rather than continue to pummel Ranger Roy, he charged the archer.