Over their link, he heard Chu take in and slowly let out a deep breath.
“Still here on Mars,” Kaice said. “She never leaves her apartment, convinced the MCA watches her constantly and terrified they’ll pick her up again and throw her down a deep, dark hole permanently. Sometimes, she and I talk, not enough, and not often enough, but when we do, I think it helps us both just a little.”
Fergus sat down in the sand. “I wish . . .” he said.
“That you could have rescued her? Or kept her from being taken in the MCA’s retaliatory roundup in the first place? We all wish that,” Kaice said. She sat down beside him, and the others stood watch a short distance away. “None of us—including you—had that chance. It is what it is. It is why we still fight the MCA and their illusion of benevolence, because anyone who stands up, they still try to knock down and break. Is Dru why you’ve stayed out of touch so long?”
“I just didn’t want to get anyone else hurt,” Fergus said.
Kaice put her arm around him and clunked her face shield against his. “This is a thing you need to know: for all her fears and inner torment, Dru regrets nothing. It is the one thing she speaks clearly on. She is broken, but she is still Dru. Don’t you be lost to us for less good reason.”
“Okay,” Fergus said.
Kaice stood and offered Fergus a hand up. He stood too, feeling shaky, but the grip around his heart had eased. “We part company here,” she said. “Your friends are waiting, and you have a job to do.”
“It was good to see you again, Kaice,” he said.
She smiled. “Until next time.”
He watched until they’d faded into the darkness, then turned toward the bright bubble on the horizon that was the hotel, and walked back hand in hand with too many thoughts.
* * *
—
Isla, Mari, and Arelyn were camped out on the big sofa in the lobby of the hotel when he returned and handed over his suit at the front desk. He slumped in the armchair opposite them. “You missed dinner,” Isla said. “It was some sort of peanut noodle thing.”
“With carrots in it,” Mari said. “Not carrot slices. Whole carrots. Even I’m pretty sure that’s not normal.”
“The coffee was great, though,” Arelyn added. “Some of the best I’ve ever had. We drank it all.”
Fergus slouched farther down with a groan.
“So, we’ve been talking about the job,” Mari said.
“The way we see it, the problem can be divided up into several discrete tasks: location, retrieval, transport, storage, and protection,” Arelyn said. “You’ve got the last two sorted, but that still leaves the rest.”
“We’ve got a friend in orbit who’s going to help with some of that,” Fergus said. “Until I can figure out how and where to look, everything else is impossible to plan ahead for. Especially when we’ve got competition.”
“Is your friend less conspicuous-looking than you?” Mari asked.
Isla and Fergus both burst out laughing at the same time. “I’ll take that as a no,” Mari answered dryly.
“Seriously, though, finding things is what I do. This is more of a challenge, and more urgent than most of my jobs, but once I get my bearings and some information under my belt, I’ll be okay,” Fergus said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. “The exciting part will be liberating any pieces my competitors have already collected from them.”
“ ‘Exciting,’ huh?” Arelyn said. “You going to drag your sister into that?”
“I was hoping she might stay here with you,” Fergus said.
“What?” Isla said, and punched him on the shoulder.
“Think about it!” he said. “You did ask me where I thought you should spend your break. Why not Mars?”
“You just want me out of your way,” she said.
“I want you out of danger,” he said. “Immediate danger, anyway.”
Mari snorted and looked over at Isla. “Look,” she said, “if you want to stay here, you can help coordinate things with Arelyn while Fergus runs around getting blisters and getting shot at and all the usual stuff he does for fun. Arelyn can teach you how to drive a buggy on Mars. It’s super fun, once you get used to only being able to move in two directions.”
“Not including that time you nearly rolled one,” Arelyn said.
“Mostly only two directions, then,” she said. “Fergus is absolutely the most frustrating person to hang around with. He’ll drag you all the hell over the place, with no clue at all where he’s going or what he’s doing until a big-enough clue finally whacks him in the face. Much easier and safer to sit back and let him flail till he gets it.”
“Yes. That!” Fergus said, too loud and definitely too enthusiastically, from the glares Mari and Isla shot him.
“But,” Mari continued, with emphasis, “if you don’t want to hang out here on Mars, you don’t have to. You can go wherever you want, even if for some fool reason that means sticking with him. He owes you that.”
“Wait—” Fergus said, and this time, Mari whacked him on the arm. “Ow! I thought you were on my side.”
Arelyn rolled her eyes. “There is no ‘you’ side; there is—and fuck if I know how this happened—only ‘our’ side. If you’re not lying to us about what’s at stake, this is a lot bigger than can be trusted to one person alone, no matter who they are, because if you fail or, worse, get yourself killed doing something inanely stupid, someone needs to be able to pick up where you left off. Maybe having your sister with you will keep you from making stupider decisions.”
“I’m not very good at the team thing.”
“No fucking shit, you’re not,” Arelyn said. “But you need to be.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else maybe everyone dies, apparently,” Arelyn said. “Which one would be harder for you to live with?”
“You know she’s right, Fergus. And you gotta let Isla decide for herself.” Mari said, and turned to Isla. “Think about it; let us know in the morning. We won’t let him leave without you, if that’s what you want. Because we’re a team, either way.”
“Awright,” Isla said. She fixed Fergus with a defiant stare. “Morning, then.”
“Fine,” Fergus grumbled, and stood up, feeling accumulated stresses seeping out of every muscle and bone, like drowning from within. “We can be a team. Someone else come up with our slogan, uniform, cute mascot, and next clever plan; I’m tired and no one saved me coffee, so I’m giving up and going to bed.”
“Asshole,” Arelyn muttered, none too quietly, and as far as Fergus was concerned, that was a fine and fitting note to end the day on.
Chapter 6
Fergus got up with the sunrise and walked over to the window to look out on the mountains to the west. Isla was still snoring softly, sprawled across her bed, and he was careful to make as little noise as possible as he stood there, mulling over and discarding fading remnants of the night’s dreams, as he stretched his neck side to side, rolled his shoulders, then glanced down out of the window and found a half-dozen black-and-white antelope faces staring back up at him, as if they had expected him to be there.
Okay, that’s just weird, he thought, and backed away from the window. Rather than risk waking his sister by rummaging through his pack for a clean shirt and shorts, he decided his ratty and threadbare pajamas were still perfectly socially acceptable at this hour, and let himself out of the room as quietly as he could to go find some of that “perfect” coffee Arelyn had mentioned, and which had competed for attention in his dreams against Dru, the ever-present Asiig, and, for some unfathomable reason, toads in tiny pointed hats.
In the dining room downstairs, a young woman was just setting up the coffee, steam seeping out around her. He could smell it already, the rich, bitter, beautiful aroma beckoning in the universal language of morning. He picked up a mug, stand
ing back patiently so as to not appear too rude, and looked around the mostly empty room. There were only two other guests there, sitting next to one another at a table in the corner, and they were not human.
Yuaknari on Mars? Fergus wondered. Not that he’d doubted it, but the hotel’s reputation for unusual visitors was apparently well earned.
The woman finished with the coffee. “A few minutes to brew,” she said. “I’m Verah, the hotel cook.”
“Fergus,” he said, before he could think to lie. “Random guest.”
“You came in yesterday?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Was, ah, lunch and dinner . . .”
“I missed dinner,” he said. “Lunch was interesting.”
She winced. “Interesting?” she asked.
“I’ve had worse,” he answered, which was certainly the truth. No doubt recognizing how low a bar that statement could represent, the cook’s wince deepened. “It was okay. Really,” he added. He saw no need to get Goom in trouble.
“You missed dinner?” she asked.
“Business meeting ran long,” he said.
“Eggs?”
“What?”
“It’s about an hour before breakfast, but if you want, I can make you up some eggs. Scrambled?”
“That would be lovely,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, gave the coffee urn one more check, then headed out.
Fergus took a chair at a table of his own and took out his handpad, and decided that if the coffee came anywhere near Arelyn’s taunting hype of the night before, and unless the eggs were absolutely terrible, this might now be his favorite place on Mars.
He didn’t want to do any deep searches on either Fajro Promeso or the white van plate without his confuddler, which was tucked away in his pack checked with his exosuit and other tech at the hotel desk, so he cruised through SolNet, looking for what he expected would be a plethora of miscellaneous information about any orbital incidents that could have been the source of the fragments. Duff had described it as having been about a decade earlier, so he started his search there and then widened out six months at a time in either direction.
There was nothing. There weren’t even any conspiracy theories being floated around the usual spaces, which, given how little it took to get people enthusiastically and wildly speculating about almost anything and everything, no matter how trivial or obviously benign, made him triple-check that he had a full, unfiltered connection out. It wasn’t his connection—there was no data. And there was never no data.
He dug deeper. At some point, a plate of eggs appeared in front of him without him noticing, which he felt bad about, and then they disappeared from the plate with only the lingering taste of excellent eggs on his lips to indicate where they had gone.
When he looked up to find he had also run out of coffee from his mug he hadn’t noticed having or drinking, he realized that Mari was sitting at the table as well, and the room had filled up with a motley assortment of Marsies, a few obvious offworlders, and three more aliens. Beyond them, along the wall with the coffee urn, a full breakfast buffet had been laid out. “Are those muffins?” he asked.
“Yep,” Mari said. He noticed that she had a small, empty plate with crumbs on it, and that her packed bags were on the floor beside her. She had said she was heading home today.
“You doing research?” she asked.
“Trying,” he said. “There’s nothing out there. There’s never nothing on SolNet. The only vaguely, maybe connected thing I could find was a couple who posted a ten-year-old photo of themselves at a club named the Dingo Hole and there’s a notice on the bulletin board behind them offering a reward for any unusual metal pieces found near Burringurrah.”
“Burring—”
“It’s in Australia,” Fergus said. “It’s an Earth place. Thing is, the photo was only posted yesterday, some sort of anniversary look-back thing. I bet it’s gone within a week, because sure as I am about anything, someone is scrubbing that particular set of data and any references to it.”
“The cult?”
“I doubt it. Someone with enough reach and skill to do that to gojirabytes worth of data over a decade is someone very serious and very heavily resourced.”
“The Alliance, then?”
“Maybe.” Fergus grimaced, got up, refilled his coffee, and grabbed the last muffin. “The Alliance is a huge bureaucracy. Even when they do sneaky bad things, there’s always some poor jerk, somewhere, keeping track of every penny spent,” he said when he got back to the table. “Even their operation under the ice of Enceladus had books, and that was what made the difference between them being able to utterly deny it versus declaring it a rogue operation and launching an ‘internal investigation.’ And that was a tight operation, extremely isolated in a single location. There would still be something. Oh!” He held out his handpad toward her. “Photo is still there, but now it’s just an ad looking for scrap.”
He broke the ad out, zoomed in, applied every filter he had in his handpad’s memory, and could find no trace of the tampering other than his own memory. “That was faster than I thought,” he said.
“At least we have a lead, though,” Isla said, and he looked up to realize she’d joined Mari at the table, the dining room population had turned over, a second round of muffins had come and mostly gone, and so had his coffee again.
He harrumphed, got up, and poured himself more, then returned to the table. “Not much of one,” he said. “And everyone else still has a ten-year head start.”
“Why change the pic if they’d already found what they wanted, though?” Isla asked.
“I don’t know. Completeness? Or maybe they didn’t find it,” Fergus started swiping his connections closed, one by one, just in case there was any backtrace to anyone who’d looked at that club photo. “In any event, that seems a good place to start looking, since we’ve got nothing else. I’ve never seen such an information black hole in my life.”
“Ask the Librarians,” the cook, Verah, said as she was collecting the empty trays, then looked up, embarrassed. “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
“What do you mean?” Isla asked. “Go to a library? There aren’t many of those anymore.”
The cook sighed. “And we’re the worse for it,” she said. “No, I mean the Librarians, capital L.” She reached into her apron pocket and, after lengthy exploration within, fished out a small pen. When a second search failed to produce what Fergus assumed was something to write on, she bit her lower lip in frustration, narrowed her eyes at Fergus, and said, “Hold out your arm.”
Bemused, he complied, and she scribbled a long series of numbers and letters on his arm. “Send your search query there,” she said, dropping her pen with satisfaction back into her apron.
Fergus bent his elbow and looked at the string. “It’s a bad address string,” he said. “There’s too many octets.”
The cook shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, and took their empty plates with her as she left.
Arelyn put her face in her palm. “You know Verah is pretty much the owner of the hotel, right? And that more information moves through this place than anywhere else on Mars? She just likes being a cook.”
“But it’s got too many—” Fergus started to say.
“I know! But I also know she wouldn’t get something like that wrong,” Arelyn said. “I trust her more than you.”
“That’s not saying much,” Fergus grumbled. He pulled out his handpad again, tapped it awake, transcribed in the number from his arm, and dumped his search query blocks into it. “Take it a few seconds to bounce, and then . . .”
He trailed off, waiting. More than a few seconds passed.
“Huh,” he said, about two minutes later. “Maybe it’s a slow connection?”
Arelyn was shaking her head. “You never—” she started
to say, when the handpad flashed and went black, except for small white letters in the center.
Sol:3:35.17,-106.373056
Catalog:4F6E696E65766E6147726E467267-386370
Information Is Never Lost
“That’s a funny bounce message,” Mari said.
“Har har,” Fergus answered. “Fine, I was wrong. That first line looks like coordinates.”
“Of course they’re coordinates,” Mari said. “Just what to?”
“Well, Sol:3 is Earth—” Fergus started to say.
“No shit? Thanks,” Mari said, and made a face at him.
“Obviously,” Fergus said. “I’d say North America, somewhere in the west. Why is everyone I know a smartass?”
“It just feels that way in comparison to your dumb ass,” Arelyn said.
“Hey,” Isla said. “He’s my brother. I have exclusive rights to calling him an idiot, okay? Besides, he’s thinking; he needs all the concentration he can muster or he’ll overheat.” She started fanning Fergus with her hands.
“You are all such enormous help,” Fergus said, still trying to figure out how the node address could have possibly worked.
Arelyn unrolled her own handpad—he cursed his past self for being too cheap to get one that flexible, and cursed his future self for inevitably making that same cheap call the next time he needed to replace his—and grabbed a SolNet satellite feed.
She zoomed in, showing a winding, poorly kept road, and the scrub of trees and grasses. “Southwest Territories,” she said. “Sandia Mountains. Hang on.” She switched the feed over to a cached infrared scan from the previous night, and again there seemed to be nothing but wilderness. “That’s your mystery spot: there’s nothing there. So, now we can all get on with the things we need to do, right? Isla, you made a decision?”
“I’m going with Fergus,” she said.
Fergus caught a smile on Mari’s face and realized if he argued, he’d have no one on his side, he’d lose, and everyone would just be even more cross. With the unpleasantly familiar sinking feeling of defeat, he gave in. “Might as well check this out,” he said. “The only other lead we have is Australia, and we know someone’s ahead of us on that one.”
The Scavenger Door Page 10
