“Uh. Mostly?” he said.
“I was starting to think ye might have been killed,” Isla said. “Ignatio told me not to worry, but that’s nae as easy as it sounds.”
Fergus groaned and resisted the temptation to beat his forehead against the side wall; the conference call had been his idea, so he could hardly complain now. “It was more boring than that sounds. No biggie,” he said. “I’ve got a ride arranged after the show to Perth.”
“I’m in Port Hedland,” Isla said.
“Also, so is my shuttle,” Whiro said.
“One thing at a time,” he said. “I need to let the heat die down on Murdoch Maxwell for another few days, just to be on the safe side. And I think it’s time I find out more about our competition. Check this out.”
He held up his handpad, camera on wide angle, to show off his collection of newly dead spyware nestled inside his pack. “One stationary cam, three drones. The cam is total standard off-the-rack Alliance issue, but the drones? Those are some dark-ops top-of-the-line shit,” he said. “These are just the ones I could catch.”
“You’re not outside-outside,” Isla said. “I see walls. Walls with a lot of graffiti. Where are you? Are you calling us from inside a bathroom?!”
“Yeah, but—”
“That is bloody pure gross, Fergus,” Isla interrupted.
“I’m not doing anything in here,” he protested. “I have some manners, you know!”
“Ye do? First—”
“It would be helpful if we knew who those drones belonged to,” Whiro interrupted.
Fergus could have kissed the ship, if the ship had been there, he was so relieved. Meanwhile, behind him, the beat had changed over to a fast-paced taktaktaktaktaktakBAMtaktaktak that he was pretty sure was gonna make his eye twitch in time with his helplessly tapping foot. “As I was about to say, your standard Alliance op isn’t going to have this hardware,” he said, and tapped the two dark ops drones. “While we know firsthand that the Alliance is capable of running rogue operations, if this was one, why wouldn’t all their tech be this level of sophistication? These models aren’t interoperable with the others, to the best of my knowledge, which means running them together slows you down while you have remote servers do the interpretation between them. And if you’re okay with the lag that imposes, why waste your cred on the fast, fancy illegal surveillance tech to start with?”
“This fits into your hypothesis of multiple organizations at work,” Whiro said.
Behind him, someone rattled the door handle.
“Exactly. Look, let me talk, because I’m running out of time,” Fergus said. “I’m willing to bet these top-end drones don’t belong to either the Alliance or to a bunch of half-starved apocalypse cultists, but it’s absolutely plausible for White Van Kyle, with the van full of mystery electronics he parked outside the Drowned Lad. But who knows who else might be out there? We need the answer to that, sooner rather than later. Any of you heard the old tech term ‘honeypot’? Because we need to make one. Whiro, if you could, can you route-encrypt a message to Lunar One, node four-four-seven-bee-zero-cee-eff-nine-eight-one-three? Address it to Francesco.”
“And the message?”
“Say: an old fan of the theater is looking for a part actor in an off-Broadway, off-license play. Potentially multi-week run, stunts likely. Venue, expenses, and per diem covered. Sign it Finnigan, and let me know when we get a reply?”
“I will do so, Mr. Ferguson,” Whiro said. “And it is done.”
The knob rattled again, and then there was pounding on the door. He could no longer feel the low bass thump of the band vibrating through his bones, and it was as if he could breathe again, and at the same time, desperately missed it. And, speaking of desperate, if the show was over, it was about to get very crowded outside his bathroom door.
“Great,” Fergus said. “I gotta go. See if you can find out where Detective Zacker is hanging his hat these days. I’ll call you when I’m in Perth.”
* * *
—
Fergus had just been dropped off, some nine hours later, along the waterfront of Perth near the Tsunami Memorial when he caught the muffled chime deep in his pack. He sat on the marble wall overlooking the beach, enjoying the feel of moisture in the air and the warmth of the sunrise climbing up behind him, and pulled his handpad out.
The man who appeared on the screen was late middle age, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Over his bare, hairless, light-brown torso was a bandolier made of orange sequins that held, every few inches, miniature gold forks and spoons. His hat was a matching orange fez with what seemed to be purple tentacles sprouting from the top. “Finnie!” the man declared.
Fergus grinned. “Francesco! That is one hell of an outfit.”
“Yes! Turan made it for me, and it is my current favorite. Not your style, though. Fashion is a tragic failing of yours.”
“It is,” Fergus agreed. “I don’t dare ask what you’re up to in that outfit, but I assume it’s another of your underground theater events.”
Francesco leaned closer to his own screen. “They remember the hat and never the face,” he said. “And thus, the revolution is free to continue. But, alas, such fabulous tactical gear is not cheap. You have a paying gig?”
“Yeah. I need someone to play the role of, well, me. People are going to come looking for me, and I need to know who shows up. One is likely to be the Alliance, so there’s the bonus comedy of sending them on a wild goose chase. I’m not sure who or how many others, but at least two, and they are less predictable and possibly a lot more dangerous.”
Francesco shrugged. “This is here on Luna?”
“No, down here on Earth.”
The man winced. “Ah, Finnigan, my friend . . . You know our stage is here.”
“I know. I can’t tell you anything about what I’m working on, but it’s big enough that the consequences extend well beyond both Earth and Luna, and I need someone I can trust completely and who can handle sudden improv. Unless you have someone here you’d recommend?”
“Not for your type of plays. When is opening night?”
“It’s flexible, but a few days from now would be good,” Fergus said. “There is some urgency.”
“Bad Yuri has your build and skin color, or at least that ghastly paleness you call a body. We’d have to arrange for the beard, and some hair-color nanites, but that could be done.” Francesco took a deep breath and then named a hefty price. “It is only because I need to pay off this fez,” he added. “Also, Azuretown’s greenhouses took a hit from space crap that somehow got through their gel canopy, and repairs aren’t cheap. You know I would not extort friends. And if it were not you, who found my stolen Guild ring, there would be no price high enough to tangle with the Alliance on their grounds instead of my own.”
“Understood, and I agree to your price,” Fergus said. “I’ll take care of the setup and be back in touch with the details.”
“It’s good to hear from you again,” Francesco said. “One of these years, you must come play with us. We’d have all the best sorts of fun.” He tipped his fez, causing the tentacles atop to wiggle alarmingly, and disconnected.
Fergus smiled and had to stifle a sudden, jaw-cracking yawn. His ride had been with a young man who went by the name of Chickenleg and who had been desperately chatty the whole ride. It had kept Fergus from dozing off, but he suspected that it was also the only thing that kept the driver from doing so as well, and with no autodrive available for most of the way, that had been a forgivable fault.
A few more tasks, and he’d find somewhere to crash for a solid ten-hour nap. The next call he made was to a node number Whiro had dropped to him sometime during the night.
Clarence Williston Zacker, retired detective of the Sovereign City of New York, was, to the untrained eye, the opposite of Francesco. Dour, dressed in nondescript civilian clot
hes that hung on his body as if his body was trying to reject them, he scowled over the video link at Fergus. “You,” he said.
“Me,” Fergus said. “How are you doing?”
“Took three fucking bullets,” he said. “How do you think I’m doing?”
“You’re not dead,” Fergus pointed out.
“No,” Zacker answered. He sounded disappointed.
“I didn’t call at a bad time? You’re not in the middle of dinner?” Fergus asked. The Sovereign City of New York was thirteen hours behind him.
Zacker snorted. “Right, regularly scheduled meals. Always meant to try that someday.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not one to talk. Things any better with Deliah?” Deliah was Zacker’s estranged daughter.
Zacker’s face went through a rapid series of expressions, most of them some variant of furious, then he seemed to deflate a little. “We’re talking,” he said at last. “I’m not very good at that stuff.”
“Yeah, me neither,” Fergus said. “So . . . you bored?”
“Holy shit, yes,” Zacker said. “You in trouble again?”
“I’ve got a surveillance-and-backup job for you. Better digs than last time, and I’ll cover food and expenses. Shouldn’t involve any direct danger, but it could.”
“Good cause? Nothing illegal?”
“Saving the world?”
Zacker snorted. “I’m not sure that counts as good,” he said. “Where? And don’t tell me fucking Pluto.”
“Right here on Earth. Australia.”
“Aren’t there snakes?” Zacker asked.
“I haven’t seen any. But you could always just shoot them,” Fergus said. He was pretty sure firearms were just as illegal there as almost everywhere else on Earth, but he didn’t figure that was his responsibility to say.
“Then I’m in,” Zacker said. “Tell me the setup.”
* * *
—
Fergus booked a short-term apartment under a new—and, he was proud to say, non-alliterative—alias, Clyde McBean, and paid his usual identity service to drop just enough bits and pieces out there onto SolNet to give him a shallow history that would pass a cursory check. That done, he spent more time making sure there were no easy-to-find holes in his Murdoch Maxwell alias; he had one more use for his hapless helium salesman after all.
Convinced that it would stand up to all but serious scrutiny, and that even then nothing pointed back to him or anyone or anywhere he cared about, he reserved a second apartment under that name directly across the street with a move-in date of tomorrow. He tried not to think about how much he’d been bleeding his financial accounts the last few jobs, and wondered if things would get so dire, he’d have to call in Duff’s debt for finding his sheep. If it gets that bad, I’m in deep, deep trouble, he thought.
Zacker wouldn’t get to Australia until tomorrow at the earliest, which meant for the moment, the very large, very soft-looking bed in the McBean apartment was his. He crawled into it, put the Burringurrah fragment under one of the pillows with the pointiest edge safely down, and pulled the slightly dusty, over-laundered comforter and blankets up until he was virtually buried in them. With the brilliant midday sunlight streaming in from the room’s small oval window, he let himself sleep.
* * *
—
In the comfortable pseudo-anonymity of dusk, he ventured back out into the suddenly alive streets of Perth, the low bass call of music drawing him into a large open space where the reconstructed Swan Bell Tower, in verdigris and glass, dominated the center. Set back in a circle around it, mountains to its valley, stone buildings were decorated with a line of blue and green mosaic. The small, undulating waves hopped from one building to the next, continuous everywhere there was a solid surface to continue on, depicting how high the tsunami waters had come. The line was above Fergus’s head. He couldn’t help but raise his arm and see that his fingertips just barely crossed it; it was a sobering piece of art.
The walls below the wave were engraved, fading gold paint deep in the sharp cuts, with the names of all the dead.
Despite that, the square—a misnomer, geometrically if not functionally—was teeming with people and lights and noise. There were performers dancing on small portable mats that projected lights and holographic imagery upward around them, while others had entire pop-up transparent booths with shifting backdrops and, typically, artificial smoke. It made for mesmerizing confusion, as musicians around the circumference of the bell tower played nearly every Earth instrument he could recognize and more than a few otherworldly ones as well. Between them were numerous food carts, their cloying steam fighting to dominate each inch of the breeze coming in off the ocean, their solar canopies rolled up for the night and the steady hum of their full batteries underneath another kind of droning instrument to Fergus’s senses.
He tapped his camera and earpiece on, and opened a two-way connection to Isla. “Thought you’d like to see this,” he said, and tried to catch a panorama from where he was standing that would do it even slight justice.
“Yeah, I would. In person,” she said. “Do ye know what there is to do in Port Hedland? Other than drink? Nothing. And here I hadn’t bothered to get my Substance Education Certificate because I never thought I’d be abandoned in a motel in Australia with nothing to do.”
“They probably don’t check, anyway,” Fergus said.
“No, they don’t,” Isla said, and took a sip from a bottle that she grabbed from somewhere out of her connection’s line of sight. “Too bad I don’t actually like alcohol. I wonder what else I can find to try.”
“Uh. A museum?” he suggested. “Virtual library?”
“Said just like a big brother,” she said. “Just not the brother I thought I had, who seemed to have fun adventures all the time until he made the mistake of coming home. No wonder ye ditched me already.”
“How many of those have you had?” Fergus asked.
“Not nearly enough,” she said. She sighed and set the bottle down, somewhere out of sight. “And too many. Guess I can also cross getting drunk off the list of things I thought would be more interesting than they are.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can come back there—”
“What are you doing? Right now?”
“Setting up a trap for the people watching the fragment sites,” he said.
“At a street festival?”
“I just came out to go get supplies,” he said. “And food. This was all here happening; I had no idea. Have you eaten anything? You really shouldn’t drink on an—”
“Yes, Fergus, I ate something. Found a decent sushi place, and no, I’m not telling you where it is. How long?”
“Until what?”
“Till you get yer arse back here,” she said. “I keep thinking about the physics and how this dumb multidimensional door thing works, and none of it makes any sense and I feel stupid and useless.” She had turned her face away from the camera, and he couldn’t tell if she was just avoiding eye contact or was trying hard not to cry.
“Look, we’ve hardly started, and we’re still just gathering information, right? The more info we get, the more it’ll make sense. And even if it doesn’t, do we really need to know how it works?” Fergus said. “Once we’ve found all the pieces, Ignatio can hand them over to someone who knows what they’re doing, no need to mention humanity or Earth at all, just ‘Lookie what I found; can you bin it for me?’ And in the meantime, you can call Ignatio or Whiro any time you want and talk however much science you want, and I assure you you’ve got a much better chance of understanding it, even drunk off your ass, than I ever will. Tomorrow night, okay? Then we’ll do something fun.”
“Yeah, what?” she asked suspiciously.
“Ice cream? And then it’s a surprise. Trust me.”
Isla nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I think I need to go lie d
own now.”
The connection cut out. He stood there, looking at the blank screen, and hoped she was now getting much-needed sleep. Still, he checked in with Whiro and asked it to let him know if her pager signal strayed from its current location.
Fergus wondered if it would ever stop being weird feeling responsible for other people.
With this many street performers, it didn’t take him long to find a small shop tucked away along the side of one of the buildings in the ring, filled with dance shoes, holo-mats, and a rainbow cacophony of costuming items. He bought a pair of round-lensed sunglasses that shifted colors through the rainbow for Ignatio, several different tubes of hair nanites, and, with deep regret, a razor. To make himself feel better, he bought a bottle of scotch, a small string bag of mangoes, and a big slice of pavlova meringue.
Feeling okay with life, he found himself walking in step to the beat of the louder of the bands as he meandered his way, in no hurry, back to his apartment, and headed off gratefully to the shower.
Out twenty minutes later, a towel wrapped around his waist, he padded barefoot into the kitchen, leaving a small trail of water drips behind him. He sliced one of the mangoes in half and grabbed a spoon, then wandered back to see what passed for Earth entertainment after nineteen years.
* * *
—
Zacker arrived first, midafternoon the next day. The retired detective threw his small canvas duffel in the back seat of Fergus’s auto-taxi, then climbed into the passenger seat beside him. “Five and a half hours from New York to Australia?” Zacker complained. “I could’ve got here faster on a scooter.”
“Have to be a floating scooter,” Fergus said, giving the auto-taxi directions back to the apartment.
Zacker snorted, and leaned his head back against the seat rest. “You got food back at the apartment? My flight was not big on feeding us.”
The Scavenger Door Page 15
