For all that self-recrimination felt somehow due, it wasn’t getting him any closer to solving the problems he needed to solve, and it was too much of a distraction when he knew he needed to be vigilant and fully on his game. So, when the train slowed to a bare crawl through the wilderness somewhere just north of Natitingou as a herd of elephants made their way across the tracks a few kilometers ahead, he took his chance to drop his things, and then himself, out the window under the cover of the pre-dawn dark. He had hacked his compartment systems to show him operating the lights, an hour or so from now, to hopefully sow confusion if anyone checked the logs to figure out where he hopped off.
They had passed through a small town a few kilometers back, and he followed the tracks back, staying just under cover of the trees and ducking deeper in whenever another train came past. Drones passed overhead in both directions almost constantly, nearly all commercial light couriers, but he was all too aware that any of them could be easily compromised and give his position away if he strayed carelessly into the open. He was grateful that it was hot enough that his body heat required no efforts to disguise from more prying scans.
He reached the town around dawn, rented an electric bike from a tourist kiosk outside the station, and roared off ostentatiously in the direction of Lagos, to the south. Twenty kilometers outside the city of Djougou he stopped in shade, disabled the bike’s tracker, and continued down the open road a while longer in the same direction before taking the opportunity of another patch of cover to turn onto a dirt side road and speed west instead.
He swapped out the bike for another somewhere in Togo, then caught a local train in Ghana to Burkina Faso, and the next morning picked up the Lightning again, under a new name, to finish the ride to Dakar overnight, only a day and a half behind his first train. This time, he was tired enough that he slept easily, and without too much insidious noise from the haters in his own skull.
At Dakar, he wandered through the street markets, bought himself some fresh mangoes and a baobab fruit, which he hadn’t known existed. Pleased with the oblong, hard thing, it didn’t occur to him until he was walking away that it was not at all the most practical thing to carry around, and the most obvious solution to that—to eat it before he had to carry it far—suffered from an utter lack of idea how to crack the shell to get started.
Still not entirely willing to admit it had been a bad idea, he stuffed it in his pack with the rest of his stuff, stayed well out of the way of a Digital Midendian van he could feel from two blocks away, and then hired a private boat to take him to the Azores on anonymous credit, no names, no questions asked.
The eighth unclaimed core fragment was lodged on an almost impossibly steep, rocky slope on the side of Montanha do Pico. The sea breeze was a wonderful change from the still, suffocating air of the continental interior, which in turn meant he was far less churlish about having to pull on a full-body anti-surveillance suit, which was much like a three-centimeter-thick set of coveralls and hood, except the smart fabric inflated and deflated, stiffened and loosened in odd places to introduce ambiguity to your proportion metrics and break any detectable, qualifiable rhythm to your body movements, though it warned him periodically it was only operating at 82% efficiency because of the bright blue vest he was wearing atop it, counter to usage guidelines. It was a fair trade-off, and the small vest had cost far more than the entire camo suit, at a high-end extreme sports boutique he’d hit on his way out of Tanzania.
The hood cycled through displaying random faces, a Rorschach of meaningless identities, though from inside he could barely tell there was fabric at all in front of his face except for slight extra effort it took to breathe through it. It was odd, and uncomfortable, but not unbearable, and he was grateful for it as he began the ascent up the cliff and found he was pulling himself into range of over a dozen assorted bots, security cams, and other devices scattered across the entire face of the mountain.
When he neared the first, no bigger than a golf ball and camouflaged to blend in with the rocky dirt it was half-wedged into, he pulled out of his pocket an ancient metal car antenna that he’d broken off a rusted hulk abandoned beside the road during his off-train trek toward Djougou. It was just an old bit of bent metal, but no one watching could tell that it wasn’t some sort of instrument or weapon; he used it to poke the bot and conduct enough electricity to fry it, then headed past it and on.
A half-dozen drones came out over the top of the mountain while he was still climbing, and tried to knock him off the cliff face. One by one he whacked them with the antenna and watched them short out and fall, bouncing off rocks and scraggly, weather-bent trees to eventually hit the ground and shatter.
After so many times in a row having to be as sneaky as he could, it was nice to be somewhere where the only option was direct, brute-force assault.
Also, he thought as he chucked yet another newly fried bot from its hidden pocket off the cliff behind him, he was pretty sure he was ahead of Akio’s grandmother now.
He found the core fragment wedged into a crack in the rock face, just as a helicopter appeared from over the top of the mountain. “Too late,” he declared, with no small amount of joy and anticipation, as he broke the tiny tab on the shoulder of his blue vest and yanked the now-free ripcord.
The vest exploded outward, knocking him loose from his hold on the cliff wall as it engulfed his upper torso, and he fell.
The first few bounces hurt, but by the time he picked up momentum, the vest had fully inflated into a gigantic, translucent, segmented ball, with him stuck like a baby in a king cake at the center, and each successive jolt was dampened by the ball itself. That didn’t make the whirling, spinning, blue-tinted world any less nausea-inducing—the vest came with a small packet of antiemetics, which he’d neglected to take seriously—so he closed his eyes as he rolled and tumbled rapidly back down the mountain.
It was the pop of one of the ball’s inflated chambers that got him to crack his eyes open again and determine that someone was leaning out of the copter with a gun, shooting at him, and that he was a few seconds at most away from crashing into a stand of trees. There wasn’t much he could do about either, but he scrunched up and then flexed outward with his body, trying to alter the ball’s course by just a few meters, if possible.
It wasn’t, largely, possible. He hit the first tree edge-on and went careening off at a new angle, farther into the woods, until a pair of trees not quite far enough apart for him to pass between brought him and his ball to a bouncing stop, with him suspended largely upside-down inside. Large, glossy green leaves showered down around him from the impact.
His throat was parched, from more than just using his gift up on the slopes to zap things, and he was pretty sure he had yelled, in a mix of exhilaration and terror, the whole way down.
And people do this for fun, he marveled, even as his eyes settled on the small stenciled warning not far from his face: Caution: for use on unobstructed grass slopes of less than 10° only.
He could hear hissing where several of the chambers had gotten punctured and were slowly leaking their air despite the best efforts of the inflation systems. Seconds later, he flinched as another bullet tore through not far from his shoulder, and the ball began to rapidly sag. He could also feel drones heading his way from multiple directions.
“What did you do at work today, Mr. Ferguson?” he asked himself as he shrugged out of the vest, located the air chamber with the baffled exit tunnel, and wiggled his way through it and out, face-first, into the dirt and fallen leaves. “Why, I threw meself off a stratovolcano inside a bloody great beach ball, thank ye fer askin’.”
He had landed only a couple hundred meters from where he’d started his climb up, and as soon as he was fully free of the sad remains of his beach ball, he stuffed one of his last remaining blister packs of cleaner nanites back inside to do their work, then dodged into deeper woods and backtracked to the crevasse under the
roots of a toppled tree where he’d reluctantly stashed his pack before beginning his ascent. It and the bubble vest had not been compatible, no matter how hard he had tried to figure out how to make it work anyway.
The new drones were still too far away, and the helicopter was trapped above the treetops. He retrieved his gear, drank some water, then got out of there.
* * *
—
On the overnight ferry from Ilha do Pico, Whiro’s second drone, Sage, caught up to him and relieved him of the new piece. There was the simultaneous sense of being on the home stretch, along with a rising anxiety that his enemies had to be getting closer and a lot more desperate.
Since shaving in Australia, his beard had achieved some minimal level of looking intentional, and he couldn’t bear to start over again, so he settled instead for shaving his entire head bald. It was a suitably different look, and he especially enjoyed it with dark-framed sunglasses on. I look dangerous, he thought. And maybe he was.
Newfoundland, the northernmost portion of the Atlantic States Coalition, had seen rough times when it was cut off from the more central Canadian provinces after Quebec went independent, but now it was a trade gateway between the Arctic Union and the various nation-states in the continental interior. The Stephenville International Shuttleport was one of those places where its long history of boom-and-bust was written across every building, every piece of infrastructure, from the frugal conservation of older structures to the clearly cautious spending on new. Only the main terminal itself, about a decade old, showed the impractical design flair of a sustained period of comfortable funding.
He walked into the terminal building, feeling totally in his groove, and immediately spotted a figure in linen clothes on one of the benches in the open waiting area, hunched forward, staring at nothing. He wondered which cultist this was, and which van hooligan he was tailing; the cultist’s presence was a good warning that the other must be not too far away. He kept walking, not breaking his stride, until he suddenly realized the cultist was Peter—the man’s face was so swollen, he was almost unrecognizable. The yellow of bruises was also, now that he knew something was wrong, equally evident, and the huddled pose now seemed less a dejected slump and more something born of pain.
Keep going, Fergus told himself. You’re running out of time, and if this man was at all competent, he’d be your enemy.
“Oh, fuck everything for the madness it is,” he said, and turned and dropped himself on the bench next to Peter.
The man glanced over, his expression weary and distrustful, until recognition kicked in. “You. You’re here,” he said.
“What the hell happened to you?” Fergus asked.
Peter slumped further down. “Jeremy,” he said. “He spotted me after he lost you, and he was drunk, and he was pissed. Decided to take out his frustration on my face with his boots. Probably would’ve killed me, but the Reykjavík police showed up and tased him.” There was a small smile at that memory.
“And your back?” Fergus asked.
Peter shrugged awkwardly and lifted the back of his tunic. Wide, angry welts crisscrossed it in a dozen places. “Whip,” he said.
“Jeremy whipped you?” Fergus exclaimed.
Peter shook his head. “Estro de la hejmo,” he said.
“ ‘Leader of your hearth’?” Fergus asked. He’d done a little research on Fajro Promeso’s structure, and that included learning some of its organizational terms.
Peter straightened up in surprise, his face wincing in pain. “You know our sacred language?” he asked.
Did he tell the poor fellow that his “sacred” language was just a construction from the nineteenth century? That seemed, in the moment, an unnecessary cruelty. “I’ve been studying,” he said instead. “In the Secret Space Police, knowledge is key to success. So, your own people did this? Why? Not for having a sandwich with me, I hope?”
Peter laughed. “That would have earned me triple the stripes at least. No, it was punishment for being caught by Jeremy. But I should not have taken you up on the sandwich. Hunger prepares us for the fire.”
How did he answer that? He didn’t even know where to start, much less if he even should. “Why are you here?” he asked instead.
“As always, following DM,” Peter said. “They moved me here to get me away from Jeremy, but the techbros are all stirred up everywhere. Since we keep running into each other, I guess you’re probably responsible for that.”
“It’s possible,” Fergus said. “I have terrible people skills.”
Peter smiled again. “I can see that about you,” he said. “I shouldn’t be seen talking to you, anyway. Jeremy and Kyle’s buddy Mitch is lurking down by the exit. You can identify him because his skull looks like it could barely contain a cup of applesauce.”
Fergus laughed. “So noted,” he said.
“It used to be just a couple of them, a couple of us, and not much happening either way. Easy to keep our eye on them, boring except when they decided to beat one of us up for fun. Now they’re out all over the damned planet, at least four right here, including Mitch, taking shifts. How do I follow them when they have money and cars and guns and all I have is blistered feet and even standing up hurts?”
“I’m sorry,” Fergus said. “You going to be okay?”
“I hope not,” Peter said. “Letdown of an apocalypse, if I was.”
“I mean more immediately. Who wants to go into the end of the world, feeling too crappy to enjoy it?” Fergus said. He gestured around the terminal. “Coffee? Maybe a pastry? Anything?”
“Hunger prepares—”
“Yes, yes,” Fergus interrupted. “But you don’t want to pass out and miss it all, do you?”
Peter stared down at his knees, then back at Fergus. “I don’t know what you have to do with the pieces of the holy artifact, but I know it’s something. It’s too big a coincidence otherwise. But I know I can’t fight you myself, and watching you frustrate the techbros might be the first time in years I’ve actually felt happiness. So, yes, you can buy me a coffee, and even a bagel, as long as you know we’re ultimately still on different sides.”
“Oh, I know,” Fergus said. “But I can always hope.”
“I’ve never had hope,” Peter said. “Decaf, if they have it, please.”
Fergus stood up. “Man, we really are on opposites sides of the good/evil divide,” he said. “Be back in a few.”
* * *
—
Avoiding Mitch—who really did have a surprisingly small forehead, for the size of his neck and fists—was easy after Peter’s warning and well worth the cost of a little food. He liked to think he was just encouraging an avenue of information, but the truth of it was, he felt sort of bad for the man and guilty that he’d inadvertently led to the man getting beaten.
You’re getting soft, he grumbled at himself. You’re trying to stop the apocalypse, remember, not feed its foot soldiers.
One army at a time, though.
No one followed him from the shuttleport. He took an auto-taxi north to the small town of Point au Mal, an old fishing village turned thriving arts community, and rented a moped. Electric vehicles were limited to thirty kph max for safety, but he was okay with that, as he was thinking about the need to commit some dangerous thieving soon. Aware of his total lack of a plan, he was none too eager to get to it. Add to that the cryptic uselessness of the Asiig agent’s warning, whose only clear, salient point seemed to be that it was going to be a much bigger pain in the ass to find that last piece than he could possibly guess. Because that’s what this otherwise easy-peasy scavenger hunt needs, he thought, a hint of the impossible.
The target zone was most of the way up a mountain called the Cabox, about thirty kilometers, give or take with the winding path, to his north. Most of the trek followed alongside a river, which was pleasant, burbly company for the ride. The sun w
as out and there were other folks out on the wide paths, on scooters and bikes or just plain walking.
The trees were all shorter there, as if none dared be the tallest and take the brunt of the wind. They were also much thicker, less like they lined the path and more like they barely tolerated its incursion on their space, and loomed as close as they could, as if to drive home the point that you were only there on their sufferance.
Company along the path thinned out as the way grew steeper, and he had enough of a window of solitude to tuck his moped into the woods, cover it with branches, and set off into the wilderness itself. Somewhere ahead was a forest-management road, but that seemed too easy a place for DM to ambush him again. He was sure they’d try, but he was going to make them work for it.
Waiting for night would have had some advantages, but he was certain DM had goggles, and this way, there were more potential witnesses around, especially when he was heading back out of there and not wanting to be isolated or easily singled out. And trying to pass as a random hiker would be a lot harder in the dark.
So would avoiding bogs, he considered, as he found himself on the edge of one. On the far side of it, a moose was wading along the edge of the water and stopped to watch him. It was way bigger than any such thing should be, and he was pretty sure it could stomp the shit out of him if it wanted to, leaving nothing but squished Fergus paste atop the moss and rocks to mark his passing, so he backed off slowly and took the long way around. His socks were wet and squishy-feeling inside his less-than-watertight hiking boots before he’d made it more than a half-dozen steps.
Around him, the density of the trees was growing sparser, and less robust, with almost each step, until he emerged from the last few hardy, wind-battered pines and onto hard-packed earth, only a few dozen meters from the road. There was no cover ahead from there.
The Scavenger Door Page 28
