The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  * * *

  —

  Eighty kilometers east of the tip of Kalaallit Nunaat, west-southwest of Iceland, Constance landed on an abandoned data haven platform named Öruggt Hús that had been catastrophically damaged by an iceberg thirty years previously. It had been recently surveyed by the Arctic Union Bridge project to see if it could be used as a temporary staging area for equipment and supplies, and found to be too unstable. Whiro agreed with that assessment, but both agreed there was no other, better place to meet up with the shuttle that wouldn’t take too long to get to. It only had to support them long enough to transfer Isla over from the mini-sub.

  Fergus was unwilling to leave Isla’s side until the shuttle arrived; she hadn’t regained consciousness, but he had upped the sub’s heater to keep her warm, and held her hand, and talked. He told her all his good memories of their parents, few as they were, and when those ran out, tales of him and Gavin getting in trouble together as kids. He had just gotten to the one where they’d dyed all of Gavin’s da’s sheep in purples and greens and were trying to arrange the herd into the tartan when he felt the platform tremble. Whiro’s shuttle had landed beside them.

  The light, when Constance’s bay door opened again, was blinding, and Fergus instinctively hunched over his sister, shielding her. “I am going to open your mini-sub canopy,” Whiro informed him. “It is windy out, and the temperature is only about eight C.”

  “Okay,” Fergus said.

  All his hoarded heat fled from the withering blast of salty, cold, wet air that rushed in the instant the canopy began to rise, and he shivered violently in his T-shirt, unwilling to move from where he was between the wind and Isla. Instead, hands grabbed him, gently but firmly. “Give us room,” someone said, and he looked over to see Julia had clambered into the sub, the canopy still not fully upright, and Jesika was behind her, waiting to climb into the front.

  Julia was wearing flannel pajamas covered in bright pink cartoon sheep under a heavy parka, and Fergus felt overwhelmed with guilt—for getting her out of bed and flying her across half the globe, yes, but also for having so dramatically failed her injunction against getting Isla hurt. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Whichever of his sins she took that in reference to, she had no interest in it. “You need to move,” she said. “Get out and let Jesika get in. Go back to the shuttle and get yourself coffee and a jacket. You hear me?”

  “Yeah,” he said, still finding it impossible to move, to let go of Isla’s hand.

  “Look at me,” Julia said, and he met her eyes, expecting condemnation and disgust there, but instead found compassion. “We’re here, we’re going to help, but you need to move. We’ve got this. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he answered, and set Isla’s hand down carefully atop her barely moving chest, and let go.

  Julia put her arm briefly around his shoulders, then helped—firmly—to get him up and moving, his legs and back and neck aching from being so still, so tense, for so long.

  Jesika handed him several medical cases that he set on the pilot’s seat of the mini-sub before giving her a hand in, and then climbed out alone.

  Constance’s hold floor was still awash in seawater, slowly sloshing from side to side with the movements of the platform beneath them. “Whiro?” Fergus asked. “Is the salt water going to cause damage?”

  “Yes,” Whiro said.

  “Oh,” Fergus said.

  “It can be repaired,” Whiro added. “Ms. Ferguson is more important.”

  “Thanks,” Fergus said.

  “We would also do the same for you,” Whiro added.

  He stepped out over the lip of the open door and onto the rusted, corrugated surface of the abandoned platform. The wind was brutal and threatened to knock him over as he hunched up, arms around his own torso to try to keep some measure of warmth as he crossed over to the open door of the shuttle. There was nothing around them in any direction except heaving ocean and a blue sky streaked with high, wispy, diffuse clouds. Even space did not feel as empty, as oppressive, as this place did right now, and he felt like a coward for running the last few meters into the shuttle.

  Ignatio was waiting for him just inside. “Vergus,” ey said. “How is she?”

  “Still alive,” Fergus said. “Other than that, I don’t know. It’s all my fault. If she dies, because of me . . .”

  “You did not shoot her, yes? And she wanted to be there even with the knowing there was danger, yes?” Ignatio said.

  Fergus let his shoulders slump and stood there with the wind howling through the open hatch and whipping his t-shirt up his back. “What good has knowing me ever done anybody?” he asked. “I’m just bad luck.”

  Ignatio blinked all eir eyes. “I have five legs, yes, and I can slap you with four without tippy falling. Do I need to do this? Or will you come inside more of the way and stop being stupid and have some warm coffee and become warm yourself? Your new friends will call when they can.”

  “If—” Fergus started to say, when Ignatio raised three of eir legs off the floor and wiggled them in warning. “—Fine, coffee.”

  * * *

  —

  Forty boring, excruciating minutes later, as Fergus stood pacing, carrying his coffee mug as if it was his only lifeline, Whiro spoke up. “They are ready for the med pod,” the ship said.

  “I’ll get it,” Fergus said, and slopped lukewarm coffee on his hand, setting his mug down too fast.

  “I will help,” Ignatio said.

  “No; even way out here, it’s likely by now someone’s picked us up on satellite,” Fergus said. “Even if they’re not watching live, that data will eventually get looked over, and you are too easily recognized.”

  “I concur,” Whiro said.

  Fergus grabbed a blanket out of one of the shuttle’s storage closets and threw it over his head and around his shoulders, then shoved the med pod out the back of the shuttle and quickly across the intervening space.

  Julie and Jesika met him beside the mini-sub. “She’s stable, still out, and she should be okay,” Jesika said. “Your green alien friend said she’s your sister.”

  “Yeah,” Fergus said. “I know, I never should have—”

  “Your friend also said you were doing something incredibly important,” Jesika interrupted. “He—”

  “Ey,” Julie corrected.

  “Ey say you are trying to save lives, too.”

  “Yeah,” Fergus said. “It’s complicated.”

  “Help us get her transferred,” Jesika said. “Julia at least got most of a night’s sleep before your ship started pinging every device we owned, but Julia had just finished a ten-hour shift, and we’re tired.”

  “Of course,” Fergus said, and followed them back into the mini-sub, half-afraid they were lying and Isla was dead. But no, she was breathing better, and her color was better, even if his guilt got no relief from that.

  At the two women’s direction, he picked Isla up and carried her as carefully as he could to the edge of the pod, where he handed her over to the two of them, climbed out, and then took her back before settling her into the open medical pod. He stood back as Julia adjusted the pod instruments and set the systems, then shut and sealed the lid.

  “Let’s go,” Jesika said. Together they pushed the pod to the door of the droneship cargo bay, carefully up and over the bump at the edge, and then out onto the platform.

  As Julia took up position along the back, she tapped Fergus briefly on the shoulder, then held out her hand. He held out his own, and she dropped something small and metal into his palm. The bullet. “Consider it dodged,” she said. “Not boring at all.”

  * * *

  —

  “Where am I?” Isla asked, startling Fergus, who had been half-dozing in a chair nearby.

  “Mars,” he said. “We’re in a Free Marsie burrow, an underground safehouse;
I’m not sure exactly where.”

  She squinted at him, frowning, then glanced around at the windowless room with its polymer-adobe walls and light-panel ceiling. “How did we get here? And that fast?” she asked.

  “It’s been four days,” Fergus said. They had moved her to a bed only a few hours before, and the pod sedatives had finally worn off enough for her to wake. “You’re going to be just fine.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be fine?” she asked, frowning, confused. “Ye didn’t nearly drown us in that damned sub thing, did ye, ye utter idiot?”

  “No,” he said. “I got us to safety perfectly fine, thank you, and in record time, thanks to someone bleeding all over me and scaring me.”

  Now she really frowned, then looked down at herself and the smart bandage plastered across her abdomen as if it had just appeared there that moment. “. . . What?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You got shot. It’s all my fault. I never should have—”

  “Oh, shut yer gob,” she said. “I got shot?”

  “Digital Midendian caught up to us in Reykjavík. You don’t remember? Maybe not; I knocked you out so I could patch you up temporarily until we got to safety,” Fergus said.

  “Ye zapped me?!”

  “No!” he protested. “Medpatch, from the sub’s first aid kit. Plus two stabilizers and a whole effing can of emergiskin. You scared me pretty good, little sister.”

  She was quiet for a while. “Aye, I remember now,” she said at last. “I don’t know which was worse, getting shot or being underwater. I have to say I liked birdwatching much better.”

  “Me, too,” Fergus said.

  “How many times have you been shot?” she asked.

  “Is it bad if I’ve lost track?” he answered. “I mean, it also depends on what counts as shot. Old-style slugs versus big metal spears or energy bolts? Does getting grazed count? And what if—”

  Isla groaned. “Yes, that’s a bad answer,” she said. “It’s exhausting, just talking to ye sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “What happened to the mini-sub?” she asked. “Did ye get yer deposit back?”

  Fergus snorted. “We scuttled it,” he said. “Too much DNA all over the inside to trust bots to get it all. Whiro was sad; even though the sub didn’t really have a mindsystem, it said it felt wrong. Every time I think I understand the ships, I find out I’m wrong. Which shouldn’t be a surprise, given how wrong I am about everything, all the time.”

  She closed her eyes for a bit, and Fergus had just about decided she’d fallen asleep, when she spoke again. He he had to lean closer to hear. “It’s too dangerous and it’s not the life I want, and I think I knew that all along. But I’m glad I made ye take me along, even if I did get shot and shoved into a submarine without even a may I please, because I think now I understand you a little bit.”

  “I’m not complicated,” Fergus said.

  She laughed. “Holy shit, ye have no self-awareness, do ye?”

  “I’ve never been accused of having any, no,” Fergus said.

  “How bad was it?” she asked.

  “My self-awareness?”

  “No, my getting shot,” she said. She cracked one eye open, and he had never been happier to see her look annoyed at him.

  “Ach, just a wee scratch,” Fergus said. “You’re going to be fine, after you rest a bit and stop hanging out with me.”

  “I think I remember ye talking,” she said. “I don’t remember any of what ye were saying, though.”

  “None of it was important,” Fergus said. “Just trying to pass the time until help arrived.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “For what?!” he exclaimed. “Almost getting you killed?”

  “For being my brother,” she said. “I’m going to rest now. Ye still going to be here when I wake up?”

  “If you want me to be,” he said.

  “No, ye have stuff to do, and ye gotta get back to it,” she said. “Just don’t forget me.”

  “I won’t,” he promised. “How could I?”

  She didn’t answer, and he realized she was asleep again. He slipped quietly back out of the room.

  Kaice was waiting outside in the hall. The Free Marsie burrow was well lit, with sunlight-spectrum lights lining the curved arch of the ceiling, giving the adobe a warm, cozy glow. Niches in the wall held plants, medicinal and nutritional, and a few flowering sedums for color. He was reminded of the Southwest desert, and that Mars had its own sparse nature, just carefully cultivated in pockets underground.

  His life was a lot simpler when Mars was home.

  “You okay?” Kaice asked him.

  “No,” he answered. “But it could be worse.”

  “I spoke to our doc again, and he’ll check back in the morning,” she said. “Your people did great work on Isla; she’s barely even going to have a scar. She’s going to be okay. You know this, right?”

  “I know,” he said, “but it’s not that easy.”

  She nodded, and he knew she understood. “I have to be elsewhere tomorrow, but our people here will take good care of your sister. You trust us?”

  “More than I trust myself,” Fergus said.

  “Arelyn Harcourt should be here in a day or two, so she’ll at least have a familiar face around. Your friend Ignatio sent a message that ey took Whiro out of orbit to shake off some sudden interest coming first from Earthside and then the MCA. Ey said to tell you, if you were worried ey might abandon you and not come back, that you stuck em watching your cat once again, which no one, including your cat, is at all happy about.”

  Fergus managed a tired smile. “I didn’t think I was a pet person, but I guess the cat’s kinda grown on me, the foul-tempered furball. Maybe we’re just two of the same.”

  Kaice chuckled. “You’re not foul-tempered. Annoying, stubborn, doesn’t play well with others, you go through bouts of wildly inappropriate optimism and pessimism for no reason anyone can discern, your sense of self-care and self-preservation is shit, and I daresay I strongly suspect you run with scissors. But foul-tempered, no.”

  “I feel so loved,” Fergus said. “If I stay here for a week or so, while Isla gets better—”

  Kaice shook her head, her smile gone. “Didn’t you tell me our worlds were at stake? Can we afford a week?”

  Fergus’s shoulders slumped. “No,” he said.

  “Then there’s your answer. You have some more pieces for us?”

  “Yeah, I . . . Yeah,” he said. He rummaged through his pack and pulled out the can with the piece from Mongolia. “This is one. I found two more, but there’s a small problem.”

  Fergus fished out the two that had stuck themselves together in his pocket in Iceland and held them up, exhibit A.

  “Is that just a bigger piece, or . . .” Kaice let the question drift off.

  “They were two,” Fergus said. “I had them in the same pocket and they just . . . well, they stuck together.”

  “Are they supposed to do that?”

  “They think so,” Fergus said. “I shouldn’t have had them in the same pocket, but at the time, I was doing a lot of running away and hiding and not thinking about it.”

  He turned the conjoined core piece around in his hands, feeling the odd double harmony of it like a pulse through his skin, seeking connection. If I try to talk back to them, what do I say? he wondered. Hello?

  He was so tired. In the sub, sitting with Isla and waiting for Constance to reach them, he’d nearly accidentally fried the sub systems at least a half-dozen times, and as if the physical memory still lingered in some little pocket in his psyche, he was terrified that just thinking about the panic would bring it back.

  Calm down, Fergus, he told himself. You’re safe on Mars. Isla is okay. You are among friends. He took a few deep breath
s, settling himself into the mujūryokudo mindset, and felt himself start to relax, his pulse slow, and the fear subside. In his hand, the conjoined fragments also grew quieter.

  “Huh,” he said. Kaice, who had been waiting patiently for him to hand over the block, raised an eyebrow in query.

  “Hang on a sec,” he said, and closed his eyes. He tried to think of the fragments not as something in his hand but as part of his hand, his inner electricity like a branching river, carrying that same inner calmness down into his fingers and palms.

  The two pieces came apart and lay in his hand, barely murmuring now.

  “ ‘Huh,’ indeed,” Kaice said. “How’d you do that?”

  So many people he would lie to, but not her. Or maybe he was just too exhausted to care. “I talked to it,” he said. “It’s a weird electrical thing I’ve got, which is a long story, but is also why I’m the one stuck finding these things.”

  “How weird?” she asked.

  He snapped his fingers and sent off a shower of sparks.

  Instead of the flinch he expected, Kaice laughed. “Only you,” she said, amused and impressed. “Can I take those?”

  Fergus dumped them in her hands quickly, afraid he’d wake them up again, and she put the first in a can, sealed it, then did the same with the other. “I’ll get these distributed tomorrow,” she said. “Meanwhile, I have no idea what time it is in your head, but it’s after midnight here. You should get sleep. We’re going to have to bunk you with Polo, since we don’t have any more spare rooms here, but at least he’s young enough he doesn’t snore yet. I’m old enough I sound like a jump engine sucking in asteroids.”

  Fergus laughed. “You did back on Nereidum Montes as well.”

  “You are a liar and no gentleman, Earther,” she said.