The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  Isla was already poised to go as he fell in beside her, and they both turned their bike motors on to get some speed and distance. Somewhere, still off in his peripheral senses, he thought he could feel drones approaching.

  “Sorry, taking a shortcut,” he told Isla over the link. “Going to be a little rough.”

  “Whatever you think you’ve got, bring it,” she answered, then he just caught her grunt of surprise when he swerved off the trail entirely and half-skidded down a hillside toward a distant road. About a kilometer down he could see a group of several dozen tourists cycling over to see the lava fields in a large, disorganized group. He stopped under a tree and, in the shelter of its small canopy, quickly shed his hat and outer jacket, stuffing them in his pack out of sight. Despite the exertion, he shivered a bit in the stiff wind coming down the hill and glowered at Isla as she tucked away her own red jacket and pulled out a yellow one instead. At his look, she smirked back at him.

  “You just happened to have two different-colored jackets with you?” he asked.

  “Sure. Isn’t that like Skullduggery 101?” she said. “I bought it in the ferry station while ye were taking yer sweet time in the loo. See, it’s got the logo of their hoverslam team, the Magmatiks, on it. I totally blend.”

  Fergus looked away to watch the approaching cyclists and wondered if it was a common experience with sisters to feel both simultaneously proud and utterly aggrieved. “We’re here resting and taking in the view, just like normal people,” he said. “When they go by, we’ll fall in with them for a while for cover.”

  “You’re the expert,” she answered, and he made a conscious choice not to glance back at her to see her expression as she said it.

  They got on their bikes and joined the ragtag line of cyclists, and stuck with them for a few kilometers across the austere, rolling landscape, with its occasional jagged incursions of old, grayish, lichen-covered lava, before they peeled off on an intersecting road and headed into Reykjavík. Two drones passed high overhead, moving away from the city in the direction they had just come from. Too late, Fergus thought somewhat smugly, I veni, vidi, and vici’d with the sneaky.

  Nothing worrisome was anywhere near them, which meant they could coast back into the city without the enemy breathing down their necks. Isla stopped, once, to look at one of the old lava fissures, crouching at the edge and peering in, before tentatively touching the rough, almost bubbly surface. He sipped some water and waited patiently; it was a very genuine tourist thing to do, helped their cover, and anyway, he liked seeing Isla absorbed in interest. It reminded him of himself, when he was researching something for a job, except more innocent and honest than his motives usually were.

  It was like looking back in time at what he might have become if his own childhood had given him the room to care about things not immediately relevant to survival and escape. He was profoundly struck by how grateful he was to know her, to see the alternate reality he’d always wished for come true, even if not for him.

  “What’re ye lookin’ at, ye bam?” Isla asked, peering over her shoulder at him.

  “The future,” he said, and then grinned. “You know, when the supervolcanoes all finally decide to go kaboom at once and we’re nothing but bones and garbage down in those crevasses, a curiosity millennia from now for random alien tourists passing by and looking for a nice picnic spot.”

  “Aren’t ye the most fun brother ever,” she said, and stood up, shaking her head. “Let’s go.”

  They returned the electric bikes at a different kiosk and ducked into a small, touristy shop. While Isla rummaged through a sweater bin, Fergus bought a big fleece pullover covered in frolicking sheep and a voluminous hood. She smiled but didn’t say anything as they left and headed back toward their rented room.

  The pullover was warm and comfortable and the sun strong overhead between sparse clouds. This is a good Earth day, he thought. Isla seemed happy too, and they’d successfully retrieved three pieces together without incident, and possibly without anything interesting enough happening that she’d want to stay with him for a fourth.

  He found himself humming again as they strolled down the sidewalk, even as he was fiddling with the two loose core fragments in his pocket, and realized they were all humming together, and that something else was coming up behind them.

  He turned and spotted Jeremy’s van making its way down the street in their direction, just as the two fragments in his pocket suddenly shifted, as if alive, and clicked together.

  “Oh, shit,” he breathed out loud.

  “What?” Isla asked.

  Shut up shut up shut up, he thought at them, willing his bees to step in and shut them down. But he had no control yet, not unpracticed and under stress, and it felt like there was a bolt of something connecting his gut to the fragments, piercing his skin like a thin, hot wire. Inside its can in his pack, he could hear the Mongolian fragment now, too, overwhelming the signal-dampening electronics, calling out for its other parts.

  As much to cover his discomfort as to buy time, he pulled out his handpad. “Pretend we’re looking at a map,” he said. “Act cool. Don’t look up.”

  If she looked alarmed at that, still, she nodded very faintly and pretended she was studying the handpad with him, and it gave him an excuse to look up and around, and then point at the display again, as if they were getting their bearings or discussing where to go next.

  They were in front of a block of apartments, across from an office building, and nowhere easily nearby to duck into. He could feel the signal from the van getting closer, and the driver was slowing down, his head moving from side to side as he scanned the people on the walk. When it was almost upon them, Fergus glanced up, and in that fleeting moment, they made eye contact, and the driver slammed on his brakes.

  Fergus grabbed Isla’s hand. “We gotta run,” he managed to say as he nearly yanked her off her feet, pulling her into and down an alley, stuffing his handpad back inside his pack as they went. “DM’s on to us. We need a plan to get out of here.”

  “Bus?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. On the bus, they’d be trapped, and the shuttleport was too far away. He turned down another street, pulling Isla with him, then paused at the end of the block, at the edge of the city. Ahead was the open plaza of the ferry terminal and harbor. The ferry itself wouldn’t be any easier to escape from than the bus, but he remembered seeing something else on his way in . . .

  Mini-subs! Sure enough, there was a rental place right near the main ferry terminal, where you could rent a personal submersible by the hour to go out and zoom around the fascinating, frigid waters of Iceland. “Sub,” he said. “Go!”

  “Fergus, I don’t think—”

  “It’s our only way out. Come on!” He ran, and she ran after him. He could feel the energy signature of the approaching van, only a few blocks away as they reached the harbor rental kiosk.

  Hands shaking with the effort not to leak nervous electricity into the machine, he rented them a sub using a burner ID and account, gave a hefty security deposit he didn’t figure he was going to get back, waived the twenty-minute tutorial, and skipped straight ahead to the liability waiver.

  Behind them he heard the van roar into the plaza and come to a screeching stop where the road ended in stone bollards, and the sound of its doors being thrown open. He didn’t dare take the seconds to look, as he finalized the transaction and grabbed the sub control card from the slot.

  “Go!” he shouted, and pointed toward the black-and-white sub, painted to look like an orca, with the large number 6 on its nose and an open canopy waiting near the far end of the nearest dock.

  There were a few other people around, and a security officer down by the ferry terminal was on her comm, staring at the van. If she was summoning help, it wasn’t going to get there soon enough.

  “Fergus!” Isla said again as they ran onto and down
the dock, scattering gulls into the air around them, and past a young couple just getting out of the number three sub. Fergus glanced back and saw two large, solidly built men were running to intercept them across the grass that separated the plaza from the harbor proper. One pulled out a gun and fired while running, the shot going wide somewhere as people in the plaza shouted and ran, and sirens began to wail outside the ferry building.

  The other couple on the docks scrambled back into their sub, and Fergus stuffed a shocked Isla into the back of their own and jumped in after her into the pilot’s seat. He jammed the control card into the sub’s dash slot, and the moment it came live, he sealed the canopy and backed the sub away from the dock in a sudden churn of spray.

  “Buckle up!” he said, finding the dive controls almost where he expected them to be, and pulling the yoke for the hydroplanes into position as he also dumped the air from the side ballast tanks, and the harbor rose up and along the sealed canopy.

  The sharp, telltale plinks of bullets hitting the water around them told him their pursuers were getting closer, and then a thunk as one hit its target, bouncing off the reinforced canopy just before they went under, leaving a tiny pockmark in the thick xglass.

  For once, he appreciated that someone was firing actual bullets at him, because an energy weapon could have done sufficient damage to the sub systems to keep them from getting away. The pockmark was only a problem for his already-doomed security deposit, unless he took the mini-sub to depths way outside its engineering tolerances anyway, and in that case, the pockmark would become the least of his problems.

  He never thought he’d be happy to be underwater again, but he almost wanted to cry from relief when the bay waters closed in above their heads and the sounds of gunfire and sirens faded into the darkening silence around them. Brief glints in the forward lights of the sub were fish instead of fired slugs, and as far as he knew, none of the fish wanted to kill them.

  After driving haulers up and down through the bore holes in the ice of Enceladus, the mini-sub was almost cartoonishly simple to figure out. The seat was big enough for his tall frame but too soft—nice for a short jaunt around the harbor, terrible on your back for any longer run—but he hoped they wouldn’t be on the sub long enough to test that. Unlike his hauler, though, it had an extraordinary number of built-in safety features, mostly designed to keep him from not going too deep nor too far away from the shore. A stern Icelandic voice warned him he was close to violating both and let him know that if he got three warnings, he would be forcibly returned to shore.

  No, thank you, he thought.

  “Hang on,” he said. “This will just take a second.”

  He put the sub back on a slow course that made it happier, then pulled his confuddler out of his bag, ducked down into the cramped space below the controls, and hooked it in to the onboard systems. As soon as it was connected, he ran cracks against the sub’s internal software until he got in enough to disable the warning protocols, the tracking beacon, and the monitoring software connected to shore.

  He took it down another ten meters and headed obliquely out into the bay. The water would muffle the fragments’ call, and unless the van could sprout fins, there was no way now they were going to catch them. “We’re safe now,” he said, checking the sub’s air and energy reserves. “Sorry; that was closer than it should have been.”

  “Fergus . . .” Isla said as he pulled out his handpad, setting the 3-D map to show contours for the shoreline and ocean floor around them.

  “I know you’re afraid of water, but I drove haulers under the ice of Enceladus for months in the pitch dark,” Fergus said. “We’re not going to go too deep or too far. Look, we’re leveling out already, there’s still some light, and you can see fish. We’ll be out of here in no time, as soon as I find us a safe place to go back to shore, and then I swear I won’t drag you underwater—or even near water—again without your explicit permission in advance. So . . . wanna pick a place to go?”

  He held out the handpad to her. Isla was pale, wide-eyed, terrified-looking, and also, just faintly, annoyed.

  “Fergus,” she said, more firmly, and held up one shaking hand. It was covered in red. “I think they shot me.”

  Chapter 13

  Okay, Fergus, he told himself. Keep calm. You’re good under pressure. You can handle this.

  Which was all well and good, except he was already scrambling over the seat to the back, and whatever part of his brain hadn’t gotten the memo about being calm had him shouting “No no NO NO NO!” as loud as he could. “You are not allowed to get shot, Isla!”

  She was already losing consciousness as he got into the back of the sub with her. “Should . . .” she managed. “Said sooner.”

  “Where?” he demanded, and she flailed with one hand toward her side, where her yellow Magmatiks jacket had acquired an orangish stain along the open zipper. She was wearing the Dingo Hole shirt he’d bought for her, and he’d never noticed until that moment. He peeled up the corner of the shirt as carefully as he could, as she sucked in a deep breath and whimpered.

  She must have been hit in that first volley as they ran toward the docks, when he believed—because it should have been true—that the shots had gone wide. And he hadn’t noticed. He didn’t want to move her to check out the entry wound in her back, but the exit wound was an ugly, gory mess he could barely see through the blood.

  “Gavin is gonna kill me,” he muttered, and flipped open hatches in the sub until he found a meager first aid kit.

  “Us both,” Isla said.

  “I’m going to have to move you,” Fergus said, pulling his sweatshirt off over his head.

  “No,” she said, then when he wrapped his arms and his loose sweatshirt around her and carefully tipped her sideways onto the seat, she screamed and finally, mercifully, passed out.

  The kit had a small tube of emergiskin, not much more than would do for an overly dramatic papercut, but he gamely found where the bullet had gone in and sprayed it full. Then he slapped three bandages and a tranquilizing med patch on her, rolled her carefully over onto her side, and snugged the sweatshirt as tightly as he dared around her.

  Climbing back into the front of the sub, leaving her, was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

  Ripping through his pack, he found the tiny pager disk and pressed it. “Whiro,” he said.

  It took a moment, but the ship answered. “Your signal is weak,” the ship said.

  “I’m underwater. Isla’s been shot.” He tried desperately to get his brain to stop screaming at itself and think. “I need a top-level trauma surgeon we could trust, but I don’t know any on Earth. Mars, yes, but that’s too far to make it. Does the Shipyard have any medical contacts here?”

  “No,” Whiro said. “They have gone to Titan for a few emergencies, and once Triton because the orbits were more favorable, though all were before I was brought online.”

  “Shitshitshitshitfuckingshit,” Fergus swore. He pulled up his map. The only places on Iceland isolated enough where they wouldn’t be immediately spotted by Digital Midendian, who no doubt were scanning the entire island to within an inch of its life trying to spot him put the sub in, were too isolated to have the kind of doctors he needed. The next nearest landmass was the Faroe Islands, but he didn’t know if they had the right facilities, or even if he could get there in time. Couldn’t get your sister shot near London or the SCNY or Los Angeles, could you? he berated himself.

  “Mr. Ferguson?” Whiro asked. “I am extremely concerned.”

  “Me too. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anyone who can help us. I— Wait, no, that’s not true,” he amended. “Where’s Constance?”

  “I have her docked currently in Portland.”

  “Which one? Atlantic States? Pacifica?”

  “Atlantic States,” Whiro replied.

  “Do you think Constance could pick up my
mini-sub from the middle of the ocean? And how fast can you get her here?”

  “Do you have the sub specifications?” Whiro asked.

  “Hang on; I’ve got my confuddler plugged in,” Fergus said. He grabbed the case, careful not to jostle the leads loose, and synced it with his pager.

  Thirty agonizing seconds later, Whiro replied. “Your mini-sub will fit inside the droneship, but Constance’s mindsystem is not sufficient for the task of pulling you onboard from water. I will drive.”

  “Constance?”

  “Both Constance and your sub,” Whiro said. “Not to express any negative opinions about your piloting abilities, but this is extremely complex, requires flexible and precise coordination, and you are agitated. Also, I feel I should note as an aside that this maneuver is unlikely to go fully unnoticed. You do risk drawing attention from your competitors.”

  “I don’t care. How long?” Fergus asked.

  “Constance is already disengaging from her surface berth,” Whiro said. “Sixty-eight minutes to reach your approximate location. I will be accelerating your sub toward the rendezvous point to shorten that time by eleven minutes.”

  “Still, almost an hour?” Fergus said. His lungs hurt like they wanted to push all the air out of them in some great, heaving, useless scream of rage and frustration.

  The mini-sub sped up, sudden enough to almost make him fall over. He wanted it to go faster, sooner. He had never felt quite this helpless in his life, and he hated that.

  “After Constance reaches you, what then?” Whiro asked. “Retrieving the sub still does not resolve finding medical care.”

  “I know, I know. I need you to load a med pod on your shuttle and get it to Los Angeles and pick up two people for me.” He gave Whiro all he knew about Jesika and Julia, trying to speak coherently and not to babble it out, and he hoped it was enough for Whiro to find them quickly.

  “And when I locate them?” Whiro asked.

  “Tell them their helium salesman needs them desperately, and he promises it won’t be boring,” he said, already climbing back into the rear of the sub. Isla was still breathing, still unconscious, still not somehow miraculously, maddeningly springing upright to declare she’d faked the entire thing. “In the meantime, send me absolutely everything you’ve got on gunshot wounds.”