“And hiked a solid ten kilometers away from it before we pitched our site and broke out the bottles,” Jesika said. “You like mushrooms?”
“Best on pizza,” Fergus answered.
“Good man,” Julia said, and all three clinked glasses.
Julia had the typical look of Pacifica: light brown hair, a long-lived-in tan, and a smattering of freckles that suggested that, without the tan, she’d give Fergus competition for paleness. Jesika, on the other hand, had a naturally darker complexion, and her jet-black eyebrows, frizzled hair, and high cheekbones made Fergus guess she was from the Middle East or, at least, that most of her ancestors had been. Who stayed put, anymore, stayed tied to their roots? Not you, with yer bright ginger head and your Scottish-Martian accent, Fergus thought. Both of the women’s accents were pure urban Pacifica.
Jesika took a bite out of a cookie, then gestured with it toward Fergus. “What happened to your leg?” she asked, losing crumbs as she spoke.
Fergus glanced down at the pale, vaguely translucent scar on his shin, a lopsided diamond superimposed on a cruel X, the signature of the hinged barbs on the harpoon shaft that were much better at going forward than back out, and which he was still offended to have discovered were called floppers. It was a mean-looking reminder that of all the risks he took, not all went his way.
“Ping-pong accident,” Fergus said.
Julia snickered, and refilled her glass. “We’re both surgeons,” she said. “I’m trauma, and Jesika is reconstruction. We see a lot of nasty things during the course of our jobs, which is why we’re out here doing something completely different. You don’t wanna say, that’s fine, but whoever patched that up did a pretty ugly job of it.”
“War zone,” Fergus said. “They did the best they could. Also, I’m told I squirmed a lot while they were gluing it up.” Ms. Ili, who ran the Medusa medical facility in Cernee, had in fact said exactly that, though not nearly so kindly.
“What was a hydrogen—” Jesika started.
“—Helium,” Julia interrupted.
“—helium salesman doing in a war zone?”
“War had just ended and everyone wanted balloons to celebrate,” Fergus said.
“And you?” Jesika asked Isla.
“I just tie the ribbons on. Much less dangerous,” she answered. She stifled a yawn.
Jesika laughed. “If you say so. You find yourself with any more suspicious and life-threatening ping-pong injuries, Mr. Murdoch Maxwell Helium Salesman, feel free to look us up. Off the books and no questions asked, even.”
“Why?” Fergus asked.
“Because I get the feeling if we do run into you again, we won’t be bored,” Jesika said. “We’ve seen just about everything in our line of work, and believe me, even the most challenging injuries are rarely unique, and they stop being a thrill after a while. And getting bored at your job, when you do what we do, means maybe people will die as a result. Maybe not such a problem in the world of high-stakes helium sales, though.”
“It’s the door-to-door polonium agents get all the fun,” Isla chimed in, and that was cause for another round of glass-clinks and laughter, and then the harrowing story of hunting down red fly agaric in Crimea.
By the time conversation wore down, the sun had set and stars were beginning to appear. The fire was dying down, and there were two empty wine bottles in the sand beside it, reflecting the crackling embers. “And here we thought we were going to be stuck out here with Sour and Sourer for company,” Jesika said. “Glad you two came along when you did.”
“And you brought us cookies,” Julia added.
“You brought the wine,” Fergus said.
“We always bring the wine,” Jesika said. “At least, when we’re not on the job. You bring yourself in to see us after your next ping-pong adventure, we promise to laugh at you entirely soberly and do a much better job of fixing you up than the last time.”
“Just, mind you, not her,” Julia said, and tipped her glass at Isla, sloshing some of the remaining wine out into the sand. “Whatever stupid shit you get yourself into, don’t get others hurt with you. We can fix almost any kind of hole anyone has figured out how to make in themselves, but there’s no damned fix for that kind of regret.”
Jesika took Julia’s glass before she could drop it, though she wasn’t much steadier herself. “I think Mr. Maxwell here already knows that. You can see it in his eyes,” she said. “Now, before either of us get any more drunk, we have to bid you goodnight; we’re off at dawn to look for mushrooms on this here impossible rock, and we need our beauty sleep. Don’t forget to rehydrate—alcohol and dry air is a bad recipe for mornings after—and if we don’t see you two tomorrow, have fun on your hike.”
“Hiking is his thing,” Isla said. “I just came along for the scenery. Couldn’t turn down a free trip on the boss’s cred, right?”
“Right,” Julia said. She eyed Fergus. “ ‘Boss,’ huh? The two of you like a matched set with the red hair. He your dad?”
“No!” Fergus shouted in horror.
“Oh, bloody hell, no!” Isla shouted at the same time.
This amused the two women no end, enough that Julia almost fell out of her camp chair, and Jesika grabbed her arm and hauled her somewhat upright. “Well, whatever it is, never turn down a chance to see the world at its most beautiful,” Jesika said, “because you can’t miss it when it’s ugly.”
She saluted them with one of the empty bottles as she gathered them up.
Fergus picked up his empty cookie box, gave the two women an elaborate flourish of a bow, and as they crawled back into their tent, he and Isla went back to their pod to wait for the full dark of night.
Chapter 8
If you have to get up at one in the morning and sneak around in the dark being alert, coordinated, and clever, Fergus thought, it really helps if your brain is so confused by constant planet-hopping that it sincerely believes it is early afternoon, whatever your lying eyes are trying to tell you. Isla was also awake, and distinctly more comfortable about it, so it seemed her strategy of off-and-on napping for nearly two days had merit.
“This will take me a couple of hours at least,” he told Isla in a low voice, as he pulled his exosuit on. “I’ll keep you posted as I can, but hopefully it will be boring as hell for both of us. Let me know if anyone wakes up or you hear anyone coming up the trail behind me.”
“And if ye get in trouble?”
“That’s why I’m wearing my suit,” he said. “No heat signature, which makes it nice and sneaky in the dark.”
“And if ye still get in trouble?” she asked.
“If it’s small or medium trouble, come help. If it’s big trouble, summon the Hikerpod drone and get the hell out,” he said. “Wait for me somewhere safe.”
Her expression was skeptical at best, but she let him sync his comms and camera pin to her handpad without further protest before he slipped out into the night.
He tiptoed to the edges of the campground, then spent some time sitting with his eyes closed, listening with all his senses to the world around him. Once he was satisfied that he had a good sense of the sounds of bugs, birds, and snoring surgeons, he turned on his goggles to full night vision and headed quietly up the trail.
The debris zone wasn’t all the way up at the summit, which was good news, but neither was it directly on the trail. He estimated he had about an hour of hiking until he needed to turn off into the wilderness, and from there depending on the terrain, vegetation, and potential ambush by any number of poisonous critters, it could take him another half hour or more to reach it. After that, who knew?
He waited until he was a couple of kilometers up the trail before he paused for a break, found a nice, smooth boulder to sit on, and took off his goggles and waited for his eyes to adjust to the natural dark. Then he stared up at the stars and the broad band of the Milky Way
stretched across the sky like night’s rainbow.
How many nights had he lain out in the fields as a kid, safely out of the house, and stared up at the same stars? Not the same, though; there was Orion, stalking the summer sky for a change, when Orion’s presence normally meant it was going to be too cold to sleep outside and either he had to brave the house—he was adept at climbing up onto the porch and in his window with little or no noise, and by ten he could pick the lock if his father set it to teach him a lesson—or settle for what measure of shelter their shed could provide. Or, on particularly bad days, his aunt and uncle’s shed over the hill.
He didn’t think they’d known, and maybe they hadn’t. At least when, in turn, Isla needed shelter, needed family, they let her into their home and kept her safe.
Fergus thought for a moment that the stars had been his safe haven, but the idea was instantly laughable. He had gone up into the stars, traveled across them—from here, if anyone had been able to follow him, it would have seemed like nothing more than the zigzag path of one scared, lonely, foolishly defiant little firefly.
But still, the stars! He was no less awed, no less enamored of them now than ever.
There are a lot of terrible things in the universe, Fergus thought, but always there are also things like this. Sometimes, knowing how very, very small and alone and fleeting you are is also exactly how you know you are part of something vast and eternal.
“See any snakes?” Isla asked him over his comm earpiece, making him jump.
His heart pounding, he closed his eyes and counted silently to five before replying. “No,” he said. “I don’t see any snakes.”
“Maybe they see you, though,” she said.
“Really?” he said. “Is that your idea of being helpful?”
“I didn’t want ye to be bored,” she answered.
“Thanks,” Fergus said. “Thank you so much.”
He put his goggles back on and continued up. When he reached the spot where he needed to leave the trail, he stopped long enough to drink some water from his pack and then headed off into the scrub, thinking more about snakes than he should have been. There was a vague path of sorts and fading indications that at some point long before, a large number of wheeled vehicles had come and gone. Following those tracks meant he had to worry less about precipitous edges, though flash flooding from the rare but typically violent rainstorms had cut channels and miniature canyons across the landscape without regard to anyone’s convenient passage.
He knew he was in the right place without even having to check; when they’d searched for it—they being Alliance and/or the White-Vanners, as the job was more thoroughly done than he was inclined to believe of the cultists—they’d cleared all vegetation and scoured the ground in a fifty-meter radius. The harsh weather and unforgiving soil made for an achingly slow and as-yet incomplete recovery.
“Someone got a mess roarin’,” Isla said over his comm earpiece.
“Yeah,” Fergus said. “It’s been pretty picked over. I’m turning off my suit systems for a bit so I can listen, so don’t freak out.”
“Awright, I wouldnae,” she answered.
He walked to the center of the zone and sat on the bare ground, shut his suit down, and powered his goggles off, listening for that same faint call he remembered on the hill in Scotland. After a while, he decided there was something, but he couldn’t quite get a hold on it.
He got to his feet, half-sliding down a steep incline past the edge of the clearing, until suddenly the ground disappeared beneath his feet and he fell, landing painfully among rocks and dead shrubs that had washed down one of the rain gullies. Lying there, scratched and battered and smarting all over, he fumbled in the dark for his goggles.
His fingers tingled as he reached around, and he got up into a crouch and ran his hand over the cutaway edge of the ditch.
There, he thought, and tried to dig his fingers into the dirt, but it might as well have been cement. Impatient, he fumbled his knife out of his pocket and hacked at the wall, dirt begrudgingly coming free enough for him to see, in the faint starlight, the glint of something metallic inside.
He pulled it out, and in his hand, it hummed back to him, a frequency half his and half its own. It was similar to the other piece he’d found, in terms of texture and the strange, almost fractal edge fragmentation, but it was a little smaller than the first and the shape less flat. He tried to imagine how the two would fit together, but even with his sharp memory of the other, he couldn’t picture an obvious shared edge.
Maybe if he found more, the puzzle would start coming together. It was, he thought, already better than he’d expected that he found another at all, so maybe it wasn’t an entirely impossible task. A couple more, and he might even get his hopes up.
“Hello! I am very happy to see you,” he said to the fragment, and tucked it very carefully in his exosuit’s faraday pocket, zipping it in securely.
Then he found his goggles again and stood up, bruised and battered but triumphant, and made his way carefully among the washout debris to where the ditch was shallow enough that he could pull himself back out onto the open ground.
He was, he thought, another twenty or thirty meters past the cleared area. A storm must have washed the piece down, and subsequent runoff buried it just out of sight. Lucky him to stumble on it.
Stumble is right, he thought. He was going to hurt in the morning; that was certain.
He turned back on his suit and earpiece. “Found it,” he said. “On my way back.”
“Awright,” Isla said, and he could hear the yawn over the connection.
“See?” he said. “No snakes. Boring.”
As he crossed the clearing again to make his way back toward the trail, he felt a chorus of new sounds around him, and he froze mid-step. There was something electronic in one of the scrub trees along the perimeter. He hadn’t sensed it when he’d first walked through, but he’d been further up the hill.
“Something just passed the pod,” Isla said. “A hum, fast-moving. Maybe a very small drone? I’m not sure . . . Shit, there goes another. What’s happening?”
“It just stopped being boring,” he told Isla. “I’m on my way down fast, but I may not be able to get to the pod. If not, wait until morning and summon the Hikerpod drone and leave just like a normal camper. If you can, go back to Port Hedland, and if not, go anywhere safe and I’ll find you later.”
“Leave without ye?”
“Leave without me,” he said. “I’m going offline for a bit, and I’ll call you when I can. Might be a day or two. Watch your own back and don’t worry about me.”
He closed the connection, quickly pulled his hood up and sealed his faceshield, and set his suit to go into stealth mode: no heat signature, nothing detectable, except motion, of course. Unlike space, he was going to eventually run out of darkness, and in the dawn light he’d be obvious. As fast as he could safely go, he ran back up the old vehicle tracks toward the trail, as somewhere in the distance he could hear the faint whine of a drone approaching from the west, then another closing in from over the summit. And two more were coming up from below, between him and their camp.
Okay, plan B, Fergus, he told himself, and changed directions off the trail, weaving and trying not to stumble through the scrub, and hoped there were no pits or snakes waiting to surprise him.
* * *
—
“You’re where?” Isla exclaimed.
“At the Dingo Hole. Well, standing outside right now,” Fergus said, his earpiece in one ear and a finger in the other, trying and failing to block out the sound coming through the walls like a battering ram aimed straight into his brain, even as the rest of him—feet to neck—wanted very, very badly to dance to the tune of its horrendous, inflicted beating.
“Band is about to wrap for the night inside, so I wanted to call while I had some privacy,” he s
aid. Was he shouting? He couldn’t even tell. “I got us T-shirts. And I got the next piece. Easy as pie.”
“Have you ever made pie?” Isla asked.
“No,” Fergus admitted. “But I’ve eaten lots, and with the exception of pies made by our great-aunt Blaire, there wasn’t one I’d call difficult.”
“Then where have you been for the last three days?”
“Little bit of hiking, little bit of running and hiding,” Fergus said. “Nothing special.”
“You mean after you were chased off the mountain by surveillance drones and you made me leave without ye?” Isla asked. “That kind of nothing special?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” he said.
“Yer camera has been off—”
“It got waterlogged,” he said. “I had to wait for it to dry out again.”
“In the desert?”
“It’s a long, dull story,” he said. Damn, but he was going to have this music embedded in his memory, replaying at him in ceaseless, merciless repetition, until he was dead. If it even stopped then—what if you took your last earworm into the afterlife with you or were reborn with it already seated in your newly recycled and reformatted mind, carrying it with you life after life after life? BAM BAM BAM THUNK BAM BAM CRASH, the gift that keeps on giving.
“I have been piecing together your movements from a miscellany of reports that I was confident I could attribute to you,” Whiro chimed in. “It appears you stole a HikerPod from the base lodge, faked a mechanical failure in order to deliberately crash it into an artificial lake and throw off pursuit, and then hiked the twenty kilometers across desert to where New Augustus was stopped for the night. Is that correct?”
The Scavenger Door Page 14
