The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  The teasing was comforting, a return to the way things should be. He gave a bow and flourish, less smoothly than if he hadn’t been so exhausted but sufficient to widen her grin. “Guilty as charged, and at your service,” he said.

  “You’re babbling now. Let me show you to your room,” she said, and pointed commandingly down the hall for him to go.

  * * *

  —

  Fergus woke up early, nothing left of his dreams except a lingering anger and more than a little regret. He checked in on Isla—still asleep—and then wandered through the small, quiet stronghold. There were other people awake and moving, kids running in the halls unminded, adults prepping gear for a trip up and out onto the surface. Some acknowledged him, a few asked after his sister, and more than one wanted to shake his hand for being part of the legendary Sentinel team.

  Feeling undeserving of attention, much less any kind of admiration, he wandered into the back of the kitchen in search of coffee and some solitude to enjoy it in.

  A Free Marsie he didn’t know was there, an elderly woman with deeply wrinkled skin and a puff of silvery hair that made him think of Mother Vahn, back in Cernee.

  “So, you’re him,” the woman said.

  “Depends on what you mean,” Fergus said. “If it’s something bad, yeah, probably.”

  She smiled, pulled open a cabinet, and set a clean mug in front of him with the telltale brown-red color that meant it had been fired out of Martian clay. “Coffee’s over there,” she said, pointing with a long spoon. “I’m Selle. You’re Fergus?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and picked up the mug. “Thanks.”

  “You wanna make it up to me, peel some potatoes?” she said. “Makes my hands hurt, and Polo’s gonna skip out again as soon as I ask him.”

  Fergus laughed. “I think I’m getting a ride out with him, but I’m happy to peel some for you until then.”

  She dumped a knife and a large bucket in front of him, and went off to tend to something else. He dragged a wooden stool over to the wide, white polystone counter, picked up the knife, and pulled the first potato out of the bucket. Sella opened the vault-like door to the burrow’s food stores, picked up several baskets, and disappeared in.

  He sat, peeling potatoes and thinking.

  For all that he blamed himself, it was Digital Midendian that had shot his sister. All the times he’d gotten hurt on the job—shot, stabbed, burnt, kicked, that time he got thrown out a third-story window on Haudernelle—were things he accepted as just the consequences of his life choices, his career. He could not, would not, accept that Isla should be subject to those same outrages, and the more he stewed over it, the more he wanted to make sure he hurt DM right back, hard enough to keep them down.

  He had six pieces now, four more to go that were out there waiting for him. To complete the set, he was going to have to reckon with Fajro Promeso, the Alliance, and Digital Midendian. And when it was time for him to take DM’s pieces, he fully intended to ruin as much of the company as he could on his way out. If he made a catastrophic mess out of Evan Derecho’s life at the same time, so much the better.

  Revenge was a bad, bad choice in his business, but whatever little voice in his head was responsible for talking him out of stupid decisions was silent for once.

  “Not a friend of potatoes?” Selle asked, and he looked down to realize he’d gone wildly overboard with the knife, whittling the handful of potatoes down to tiny nubs awash in a sea of hacked-off strips of peel, flung far and wide around him on the counter, his lap, and the floor.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Lot on my mind.”

  “Martian potatoes don’t grow on trees, you know,” she said, but she was smiling. “Finish your coffee and then tell me about it.”

  “You just trying to get me to spill dirt on Kaice?” Fergus asked.

  Selle laughed. “I got all the dirt I could ever want on everyone here. It’s not a very big settlement.”

  “Sounds comforting.”

  “Boring.”

  “Comforting and boring,” Fergus agreed. He was more careful with the rest of the potatoes, and in exchange, told Selle the story about being chased through the Ares Three underground by a group of fresh-off-Earth teens determined to beat up their first Marsie but having very little grasp of physics or momentum under 38% gravity.

  When Polo came to fetch him, a few hours later, Selle almost seemed sad to see him go.

  Isla was still asleep, so he left a note by her bedside and hoped it didn’t feel as deeply, offensively insufficient to her as it felt to him.

  Chapter 14

  Sweat poured down his forehead and face, and he raised one arm to wipe it off on his short sleeve. Half a second later, the deluge started again, his skin suffocating in the unaccustomed heat and humidity. And to think he’d been excited about going somewhere he didn’t need a parka.

  The near-constant hum of anti-poaching drones made him twitchy and increasingly cross, though he approved of their existence in principle. Worried about the possibility that his face could show up on a hundred low-security feeds, he had his hat pulled down, and for whatever good it did keeping the hot sun off his face, the sweaty constriction made him want to scream. He’d passed through six different security checkpoints, all making sure he wasn’t armed, within the first three kilometers of his trek into the nature reserve.

  Sitting on a small rock halfway up a mountain, he could just see through a break in the trees the yellow square roof of his rental safari rover parked below. The Luguru clerk who had sold him his entry permit said it wasn’t that long since most of the land had been stripped bare and farmed to near-total depletion. Alternating deluge and drought, both ultimately agents of famine, had given the land a temporary reprieve, and technology and the will of the people had saved it. Wildlife was rebounding too, which is how he, “Johannes Jasper,” lone photographer, had gotten his entry permit.

  Speaking of his photographer cover, one of the drones keeping him company was his own, and a fairly expensive bit of equipment at that. He pulled his brand-new 3-D cameravizer down over his eyes and switched over to the drone view, then sent it up through the trees, rising past an entirely unconcerned group of monkeys in the canopy farther up the hill. From there, he could get some excellent panoramic images to feed his cover identity and also check out who else might be poking around the area.

  There were two models of anti-poaching drones that he could see. Mostly, they were tiny spotters, with the occasional larger, armed drones designed to deal directly with any threats that managed to get past perimeter security. Both were easy to identify, by sight and sound, and also by the electrical feel they made around him. There were a half-dozen other camera drones out doing touristy image-capture stuff with a variety of operational competence, and none of those were worrisome either.

  They did not quite account for the signals he was feeling in his gut, but neither could he identify anything nearby to worry about. On the other hand, the noise was also making it harder to pinpoint where, higher up the mountainside, the core fragment might be hiding. At least I’m getting better at listening, he thought. After his surprising success talking the two merged fragments into letting each other go again, Isla’s complaint that he was taking his gift too passively seemed to have a legitimate basis, though he still found it unpalatable in ways he wasn’t sure he wanted to examine, not least because he was worried he would find that his obstinate unwillingness to engage more actively with the Asiig gift had no logical or useful excuse other than his own fear.

  He was, he thought, very attached to his particular ideas of who he was, even if he was sure they were mostly wrong.

  The only thing he was sure about, in what he thought was a minimally biased way, was that he was good at finding things. And that brought him back to here and now and the task at hand, where being on the job meant not having to think or worry about anything els
e.

  A herd of brown, striped antelope was slowly moving across the plains down below the mountainside, and he took some panoramic shots of them that, while technically only for cover, he was kind of proud of. Then he sighed, parked the camera drone up over the trees, drank some water, and spent a few minutes listening to the overwhelming chaotic symphony of birds and animals all around him before grudgingly starting his upward trek again.

  For all that he was unprepared for the change in climate, it was exuberantly and noisily beautiful, and he could see how people got addicted to travel and hiking. People not him, anyway, who had normal lives. I could give up everything and be a birdwatcher, he thought, then laughed. Another pipe dream about an alternate life he’d never actually fit into, like his ongoing dream about becoming a Tea Master on the beaches of the planet Coralla. He’d even gone to Coralla once, and hadn’t even made it as far as sticking his feet in the water.

  At last, he could feel the faint, unmistakable call of a core fragment, somewhere high up the steep and uneven slope of the mountainside behind him. Between the terrain, the thick vegetation, and strict limitations on visitors inside the reserve, it wasn’t surprising that no one had gotten to this one already. It went without saying that all the easy ones were almost certainly long since collected.

  He was fortunate that there was a narrow path winding up the mountainside, even if sometimes it was so narrow, and so steep, that he had to take it sideways with his back pressed against the rough rock behind him.

  Two-thirds of the way up, the hillside relaxed into a gently sloping plateau, and trees had taken great advantage of the easier space to crowd in even more thickly together. Leaving the trail, he poked carefully through the underbrush with his walking stick as he wove through the trees, not at all sure if Tanzania had poisonous snakes. Once he was close enough, he knelt carefully on the ground and sifted through the leaf litter with his gloved hands, startling several enormous beetles, before his hand made contact with his quarry.

  “And that’s seven,” he said, and tucked it carefully in its can in his pack before heading back to the relative clearing of the trail to sit and rehydrate before the climb down.

  “Mr. Ferguson,” Whiro spoke in his earpiece.

  “Is Isla okay?” he asked, heart suddenly jumping.

  “She is the same as the last time you asked. She sleeps a lot and is bored when not.”

  “Okay,” Fergus said, willing himself to calm down. “I got the piece.”

  “Excellent. I called to inform you that we have seen a significant increase in the presence of your ‘white vans,’ of assorted colors, near almost all of the search sites. I have traced the few that passed near public cams to the same rental agency we know Digital Midendian uses. Also, one of the vans has been exploring the side roads near the Sandia Mountains.”

  “Shit,” Fergus said. “Do we think Santos is in danger? I mean, he did rip us off on that hat, but he doesn’t deserve—”

  “Interestingly, it appears all data related to that day, from the moment you left the highway until you returned to it, has vanished from SolNet,” Whiro said. “I expect the Librarians watch out for their own.”

  “I would hope so,” Fergus said. “Still, let me know if it looks like he’s in danger.”

  “It is you I am more concerned about,” Whiro said. “Of all the sites I am monitoring, the only one where I cannot find any trace of Digital Midendian is right where you are. This seems unlikely to be either coincidence or an oversight on their part. Please be careful.”

  “Always am,” Fergus said, and stowed his water bottle back in his pack.

  “Repeat?” Whiro said. “I am certain I did not just hear you correctly.”

  “I said I always— Never mind. Ha-ha,” Fergus said. “Anything else?”

  “No,” Whiro said.

  “Great. I’ll call you when I’m safely out of here,” Fergus said, and tapped the line closed.

  On his way down, he stopped at the same rock he’d paused at on his way up to send his camera drone out for another look around. Visor on, he soared with his drone down along the upper fringes of the canopy and back out again to where the land flattened and emerged from the forest, over a herd of zebra, and then he turned it around to look back toward the mountain and himself.

  The picture jumped sideways and went blank.

  Fergus checked his controls: no signal. The power cell had still had plenty of life in it. Had he heard a faint pop when it went dead, or was that just his imagination filling in something where there was too much ambient noise to have genuinely heard?

  He made sure he had everything neatly stowed in his pack, so that if there was trouble, he wouldn’t have to take time to get himself in order under duress. Then he moved steadily back down the trail, pausing to listen both with his ears and with his gut. If there was anything unusual out there, it was lost in the larger noise of signals.

  It took him about an hour to get down to where the mountain edge slowly leveled off to meet the slope of the land below, and he paused at the threshold under the trees. His rover sat where he’d left it, looking untouched, so maybe his drone had just been bad? He had gotten it used, after all, and not everything had to bear out his habit of unreasonable paranoia, right?

  It felt like a perfect spot for an ambush.

  Fergus took a single step cautiously out from the shade of the trees and immediately felt the sudden power buildup nearby. He threw himself back and sideways as bullets shattered the tree he’d just been standing beside. Rolling to his hands and knees, he crawled backward until his feet hit a fallen log, and he scrambled up and threw himself over it as one of the armed anti-poaching drones fired again.

  So, yes, definitely an ambush.

  He could feel the drone edging carefully toward the trees. It seemed to be just the one; none of the other drones in the area had changed their usual patterns or moved closer. He broke open one of his cleaner nanite blisters and dropped it on the ground beside him to take care of any residual DNA evidence, then tapped at his headset.

  “Uluguru Reserve front desk support line,” the park’s automated system answered, after a brief pause as it recognized his unit and switched to English. “Please speak your concern.”

  “Why are you shooting at me?” Fergus asked.

  There was another pause, then the system said, “I will redirect your call to an agent.”

  The voice that answered was a beautiful Bantu accent on top of drifted British English, and already sounded annoyed. “Guest 3431: what is your problem?” she asked.

  “Your drone just shot at me,” Fergus said.

  “They only shoot poachers,” the agent said. “Are you carrying arms against reserve policies?”

  “No, I’m not. I was just hiking and it took out my camera and now it’s coming after me,” Fergus said. “I was kind of hoping maybe you could stop it?”

  “Our drones don’t shoot innocent people,” the agent said. She said more, but it was lost in the sound of the drone firing a rapid burst into the woods around him, likely trying to spook him into running and giving his hiding place away. “. . . was that noise?” the agent finished.

  “That was the sound of your drone shooting at an innocent person,” Fergus said.

  The agent swore. “Hold on, please,” she said, and there was silence on the line.

  From where he lay behind the fallen tree, he could feel the gun drone moving slowly closer, not on a direct trajectory but close enough. He had maybe five or six minutes before it would be near enough to spot him.

  Did he think the support agent would figure out what was happening in time to stop it? No. That meant acting on his own behalf, but there weren’t many ways of moving from where he was without leaving himself vulnerable as he was getting to his feet.

  His hand found a stick on the ground, and he leaned up just enough to hurl
it off into the woods, away from his hiding place. Clichéd as hell, but it seemed to work; the drone swung heavily off to one side and let out another volley of bullets, shredding foliage and branches. A flock of large gray crested birds took off in alarm, ponderous for their size, and the drone swung around, tracing them.

  Fergus scrambled to his feet and ran, stretching his arm back behind him and letting all the adrenalin and anger built up in him go in one thin, crackling spark between his fingertips and the drone’s chassis. A stream of smoke poured out from its casing as its rotor blades faltered, and it plummeted to the ground with all the grace of someone heaving an anvil out of a third-story window.

  Fergus backtracked to where it lay on the ground among some crushed undergrowth, and he kicked it with his boot. He could already tell it was dead, but kicking it made him feel a little better.

  “Guest 3431, we have determined there has been a security compromise of our systems, and the drone is not acting under our control. Are you still there?”

  “I am,” Fergus said.

  “We have no location signal from the rogue drone.”

  “I took it down,” he said. “With a stick. I think it shorted out when it hit the ground.”

  “That is resourceful of you,” the agent said, in a tone that suggested it was also very stupid of him. “We don’t know how many other drones are potentially compromised, or if the whole system is at risk, so we are currently standing all units down. Any that you still see in the air in five minutes, we have no control over. We have requested help from our military, but it will be some time before they can arrive. Good luck, 3431, and whatever your outcome, please be assured we will, eventually, find and punish those responsible.”

  “Thanks,” he replied. He could tell them it was Digital Midendian, but he wasn’t going to give that away over potentially compromised lines. Maybe once he escaped, he’d drop an anonymous tip.

  First, he had to escape. The other drones he sensed nearby were all sinking lower, and none were coming closer, so he knelt down next to the fallen drone—away from the gun ports, because he was that paranoid—and tried to see if there was anything on it he could detach and use.