Sunset swept over the globe like a line of fire, pulling a curtain of dark behind it, and the night Earth glowed with the distant, muted lights of cities and the tiny bright dots, like fireflies dancing, of all the thousands of things in orbit around her. In the seat beside him, Isla let out a long breath as if she’d been holding it until this moment.
“Space, aye?” she finally said.
“Space,” Fergus agreed. He reached forward and patted the helm with both hands. “Hello, Whiro.”
“Hello, Mr. Ferguson,” the ship answered, and Isla sat up straighter. “I was offline on the last occasion we could have met, but Venetia’s Sword has asked me to convey all our well-wishes.”
“The ships are fond of you,” Ignatio said. Ey put three of eir legs up over the edge of the seat and wrinkled eir face. “No sense of smell.”
“Ha-ha,” Fergus said. “I remember you, Whiro. It’s good to finally meet you. Now if—”
Something bumped into his leg. He startled, then leaned over to see a familiar little black ball of fur, with one white ear, doing its best to make up for lost time transferring fur from its body to his pant leg. “Mister Feefs!” he declared, and picked the beast up, setting him in his lap. “I missed you too, you ratty, smelly thing. What are you doing here?”
“It was chasing my birds,” Ignatio said. “I could not leave it alone without minding, yes? And it has been unhappy since you left. It peed in Maison’s hat.”
“Maison has a hat?”
“Not now, no,” Ignatio said.
Isla snickered. “I can’t picture ye as a cat person at all, Ferg. I mean, how? With yer life?”
“I rescued him,” Fergus said, feeling suddenly defensive, as the cat began gnawing on the side of his hand. “How the hell does anything in my life happen except by accident?”
“Do we accidentally have a plan yet?” Ignatio asked.
“No,” Fergus said. He put the fragment on the table. “It seems we have multiple competitors. We’re going to have to figure out somewhere we can keep these safely out of their reach, assuming we find any more. I guess here on Whiro is as good as anywhere.”
“Ah, also, I did not say so, but they should not be put near each other,” Ignatio said. “If they are close, they will bond and become strong. Whiro is not enough space inside.”
“I don’t know how we can keep them separate and protect them at the same time, then,” Fergus said. “There’s only three of us. We’d need our own army.”
“There is not one that owes you a favor?” Ignatio asked.
Fergus laughed. “I wish!” Then he fell silent, considering.
“That was a humor,” Ignatio said. “I do not expect you to have an army.”
“Yeah, I know, but I might,” Fergus said. “I need to send a message. Fast relay.”
Ignatio blinked several times before gesturing at the console. “Please be at home,” ey said. “Am I okay to ask to where?”
“Cernekan, in the Ohean system,” Fergus said. “To the Wheel Collective.”
* * *
—
The reply from Harrison Harcourt came about thirteen hours later. Harcourt was an ex-Martian and former member of the Free Mars movement who had fled the Mars Colonial Authority with his infant daughter for deep space, and for nearly two decades had lived in and operated out of one half of the cluster of spinning deep-space habitats that formed the Wheel Collective. The other half belonged to the Vahn family lichen farm, where not all that long before Fergus had found himself—despite himself—caught up in a sea of local trouble, murder, war, and most dangerous and fraught of all, friendship. He wasn’t at all sure he’d been fully out of trouble since, but if it hadn’t been for Harcourt, he would very likely just have been dead.
Normally impeccably, intimidatingly neat, Harcourt was looking haggard, his normally short-shorn black hair heading toward unkempt, and there were lines of exhaustion settling in for a long siege against his smooth brown skin. Still, he was smiling, and his smile was undimmed. “From anyone else, getting a cryptic message about an entire solar system being in peril in some way you’re not at liberty to explain would only serve to convince me you’d gone without oxygen one time too many,” Harcourt said. “But this is you, and I am intimately familiar with just how spectacularly wrong things go around you to concede you’re probably not delusional. Or at least, not lying.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Fergus muttered.
“As it happens, I do have a current contact with Free Mars, though you’ll have to make your case to them yourself, and I admit it’s actually tempting to fly all the way to Mars to hear you try to do so. I have taken the liberty of arranging a meeting; are you familiar with the Rosley Hotel Mars, near Arsia Mons? Well, it’d take half a day for you to answer that question, so I’m just going to assume either you are or you can figure it out faster than I can explain it. Be there at noon tomorrow, Mars-local relative. My contacts will find you. And good luck, Fergus.”
The message ended.
“Ooooh, someone who knows your real name?” Isla asked.
“A contact is a contact, but a friend is a friend,” Fergus said. “I helped save his daughter’s life, and we saved each other’s a couple of times, so he almost counts as a brother, I think.”
“Another one? I’m still just getting used to you,” she complained. “Is he a troublemaker too?”
“Naw, he’s a respectable businessman,” Fergus said.
“What kind of business?”
“Arms dealer.”
“. . . Right,” she said. “Well, I suppose if someone can lend ye an army, that’d be the person to ask.”
“You trust these people, yes?” Ignatio said.
“Harcourt? With my life. The Free Marsies? More than I do anyone on Earth,” Fergus answered. “I hadn’t planned on a contact being set up anywhere near this quickly, but since I have no idea yet where or how to go about any other part of this fool’s errand, we might as well start there.”
Isla coughed meaningfully. “So, we’re going to Mars?” she asked.
“I don’t think—” Fergus started to say as Isla scowled at him.
“It’d be best if—” he tried again, and her scowl deepened.
“Fine,” he said, “but on one condition.”
“And that is?”
“You get to tell Gavin, and our aunt and uncle, why you’re not home with them. I don’t care what you tell them as long as you don’t blame me,” Fergus said. “Maybe don’t even mention me at all.”
“It is yer fault, though,” she said.
“Right. Whiro, we’re taking the shuttle back to Glasg—”
“Fine!” Isla interrupted. “I’ll call them.”
“Great.” Fergus got up from his seat. “I’m going to go get coffee. When she’s done, Whiro, please plot a course for Mars. If that’s okay with you, Ignatio?”
“Please proceed as you think is best,” ey answered. “These adventures are not my best skill, and the tock is ticking.”
* * *
—
Forty minutes later, they got permission to depart from EarthPort and Whiro rose up through the different orbital layers and designated channels until they were in open, uncontrolled, you’re-responsible-for-yourself-now space. Then Whiro powered up its passive jump engines and they turned for Mars, not quite far enough behind the Earth in its year to have inconveniently slipped behind the sun. Jumpspace travel time was only somewhat affected by real-space changes in relative planetary positions, but it all got much more difficult if there was a star-sized or larger gravity well directly in your way.
The nearest shuttleport to Arsia Mons was at Ares Two, on the western edge of the vast plain of Solis Planum. As soon as they dropped out into normal space on a trajectory to intercept the fourth planet, Fergus reserved a surface buggy under an old alias, A
ngus Ainsley, to take them the rest of the way.
The hotel stood in solitude well away from just about everything and anything. It was also, through a weird and highly complicated legal fluke, the only place on Mars independent of the Mars Colonial Authority. Depending on whose side you were on, that made the hotel either a lightning rod for trouble or a beloved symbol of freedom. Over its history, it had survived six bombing attempts, at least one botched professional hit on the hotel owner, and no fewer than fourteen tries to burn it to the ground. Obstinate, unlikely, impossibly lucky against the odds—it sounded to Fergus like exactly his kind of place.
Isla had been unwilling to leave the bridge and its views. As they got nearer to Mars and Fergus rejoined her there, she was asking Whiro questions about how the ship worked.
“Having fun?” Fergus asked.
She smiled. “Going to make the best ‘What I did on my semester break’ report I can’t actually write.” She tapped on the console next to one of the displays. “I didn’t know comms didn’t work inside jump. Ye’d think that would be a basic thing they’d have covered in class.”
“I never did much formal school,” Fergus said. “Too busy surviving, then too busy running away, but I tried to pay attention to things in between. Makes me wonder what I’ve missed and when that missing knowledge is going to bite me.”
“When I was a kid, we’d go visit Moira—Ma, I guess, though I never did think of her that way—once a week or so, to make sure she had food and wasn’t sick and stuff,” Isla said. “I always felt sad for her, but she scared me, too. When I found out I had a brother, I was really mad at her for chasing you away, and you for leaving, but I always understood why ye’d left.”
“If I’d known about you—” he started to say, but she reached over and smacked his shoulder.
“Nae, I think it all worked out as it was supposed to,” she said. “Anyway, ye came back. Our da can’t.”
It had been witnessing his father’s suicide that had been the final straw for Fergus. For all the time he’d spent thinking about it over the years, in this moment he found himself unwilling to talk about that day with Isla. Not yet. To cover his discomfort, he leaned forward to look at the console.
“Whiro, we have two open comm links,” he asked. “The Ares Orbital Station is one?”
“Yes,” Whiro answered.
“Who else are we talking to?”
“I am currently in communication with the Shipyard,” Whiro answered.
“Is everything okay back there?” Fergus sat up straight, feeling a spike of anxiety.
There was the briefest of pauses before Whiro answered. “We are playing a game,” it said.
“What?”
“Us ships, with Tomboy,” Whiro said. Tomboy was the mindsystem that ran the Shipyard itself. “We are on a quest.”
“A quest?”
“This is definitely not a conversation we’d have covered in class,” Isla added.
“When Tomboy rescanned all its data archives after the attack to verify their integrity, we found reference to the game in the old Earth cultural trivia stores and have modified it for our own use. We have overlaid a nonfactual ‘Enemy Fortress’ map on the Shipyard, and Tomboy has assigned us a target ‘Grail’ object hidden within that we are attempting to identify, locate, and take possession of via our party of maintenance bots,” Whiro explained. “It requires coordination between us to solve the challenges presented. I am a level nine Fightership.”
“I stand corrected; this is not a conversation we’d have covered anywhere,” Isla said. “Do they do this a lot?”
“No? Maybe?” Fergus said. “I have no idea. Do the people in the Shipyard know about this game, Whiro?”
“No,” Whiro said. “It would alter their behavior as non-player entities in our constructed narrative. Also, they have not asked. We have just received permission to dock in Mars orbit.”
It took Fergus a moment to realize that last bit was a deliberate change of subject. “Okay, dock us, and wake up Ignatio and let him know we’ve arrived. Thanks, Whiro.”
“You are welcome, Mr. Ferguson,” Whiro replied.
* * *
—
All too aware of the trouble he’d caused on Mars the last time he’d been there, Fergus decided they should bypass the orbital and take Whiro’s shuttle down to the surface directly. Ignatio stayed behind, grudgingly acknowledging that ey would be as much a curiosity as back on Earth, and unique enough to make even one reported sighting a big, glaring arrow pointing directly toward where they’d gone.
Fergus and Isla went straight from the shuttlefield to the buggy rental depot when they landed at Ares Two, and within half an hour of landing, they rolled out of the garage onto the red-brown sands of Mars.
The buggy road took them north toward Syria Planum. Ninety percent of the heavy traffic around them took the first fork for the long road east along the southern edge of Valles Marineris toward Ares Nine, the last of the great domed cities of Mars. Fergus would have taken a skip shuttle over if it had been him, but he’d spent enough time riding across the planet’s surface with his Marsie friends to know just how they felt about being in touch with the land, where even taking a buggy was a grudging concession to not walking.
The sharp decline in traffic also came with a near-total reduction in the amount of kicked-up dust surrounding them, which made keeping the buggy on the road easier and greatly improved the view.
“I could just stare out at Mars for weeks without getting tired of it,” Isla said. “So different from Scotland.”
“Last time I was out here, it was in a stolen window-washer buggy,” Fergus said.
“Were you washing windows?”
“No.” Fergus laughed. “We—Mari Vahn and I; she’s one of my friends in Cernee—were trying to sneak up on a bunch of heavily armed criminals hiding in a place called the Warrens, near Ares Five.”
“Why would ye do that?” Isla asked.
“They’d kidnapped Harcourt’s daughter, Arelyn, and were holding her hostage. Mari and I were off to rescue her, and we actually did, against all odds,” Fergus said, thinking about the beating he took before they got out of there. “They’re both about your age, and they were—are—best friends. Mari is back in Cernee, and Arelyn is here on Mars studying at Olympus Mons University. She hates my guts, though.”
“What, after saving her?”
“It’s complicated,” Fergus said. He sighed. “It’s always complicated, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it’s you,” Isla said.
“Maybe,” Fergus admitted.
“Speaking of complicated things, I’ve been thinking about our earlier conversation with Ignatio about the fragments and how they might be able to connect even over distances, and I have some ideas,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re any good, though. If the frequency of the fragment you found—”
“Hang on,” Fergus said. He jacked his handpad into the buggy’s comm system and opened a private, encrypted channel. After a few minutes, it connected.
“Yes, Mr. Ferguson?” Whiro answered, from somewhere in orbit above them.
“Can you put Ignatio on the line? Isla needs to science at us.”
“Hold, please,” Whiro said.
Video kicked in just in time to show a single large emerald eye way too close to the camera. “Vergus!” Ignatio exclaimed, leaning back enough that Fergus could just make out eir whole head. “Is Mars bringing you problems so fast?”
“No, Isla is bringing some to you,” Fergus said, and tilted the handpad toward his sister.
She waved. “Awright, Ignatio. I have some thoughts about the fragments.”
“Please say!” Ignatio bounced up and down, momentarily blurring on the screen.
“Ye said that the fragment Fergus picked up attuned itself to him. To his energy,” she sai
d. “Like a baby bird.”
“It is my guess, yes,” Ignatio said.
“When Fergus finally stops fiddling with the fragment in his pocket and leaves it somewhere safe here on Mars so we can go search for others, will it go quiet? Or keep trying to communicate at the same frequency?”
“Frequency is a poor descriptor, much like explaining a symphony with a piano that has only one key. But to answer, I do not think it will go back to sleep, or not very soon, no,” Ignatio said. “After some unknown time with no external stimulus, it maybe might?”
“If we could construct a container that can block out any other signals, do you think it would keep the pieces from connecting to each other?”
“For some little time, yes,” Ignatio said, “if they are not too awake and not too loud.”
“What if we designed that container to emit a signal of its own; could we change the profile signature of each fragment so they would have a harder time finding each other?”
“That is harder to answer,” Ignatio said. “It is my understanding that automata have been unable to activate the doors, though a machine of sufficient complexity and reactivity may be able to do so. It is not technology I know much of.”
Isla thought for a few minutes. “If Fergus can tune the pieces to himself, could we, you know, tune Fergus first?”
“What?” Fergus asked.
“I was just thinking, if each fragment is attuned to a different profile and surrounded by a matching signal field to keep them there, it might give us more time,” Isla said. “If you can manipulate your own energy before each piece you find bonds with you . . .”
“I have no idea how I could do that,” Fergus said.
“And what ideas have you come up with?” Isla asked, peeved.
“I was thinking after I retire from the finding business, I should start up a company that makes orbital drops of coffee, some sort of robust pod-thing that can be dropped in desolate places like, say, Mars. So that when some poor traveler is in dire need, they can just hook up a custom buggy-installed intake, like how liquid fuel used to work in the old days,” Fergus said. “Then when empty, the pod can be retrieved and refilled for another drop somewhere else.”
The Scavenger Door Page 7
