He rested inside the tree line and did his best to feel for electrical signals. There was nothing.
The summit was still a dozen kilometers away, though he didn’t need to go that far. Or so I hope, he thought. The conversation with the Asiig agent had planted doubts again about everything. Still, he had a ways to go, whether or not he joined up with the ill-maintained and increasingly nonexistent road, or tried to shortcut some of the S curves up steeper terrain, and that was more than enough time for a drone to appear and do him in before he could get back into concealment in the forest.
Right now, the skies looked and felt clear, and he didn’t really have much of a choice, so he tugged his hat more firmly into place to shade his eyes and face, and got moving. After the drone attack in Tanzania, he’d added something new up his sleeve with more range than his repurposed car antennae, and his desire to see if it worked was almost as strong as his hope that the necessity wouldn’t present itself.
The slopes were a mess of broken rocks, from tiny scree that slid out under his feet every time he strayed from the rutted road to large boulders that could conceal almost anything. Despite the lack of visual warning, he felt the tiny spark of something ahead several minutes before he got there, tucked up on the summit side of a boulder to catch anyone going past. He set his pack down, got to his hands and knees in the rough, dusty dirt, and sneaked his hand around the boulder until he could touch the stake on which the sensor had been mounted, and as carefully and gradually as he could, he turned the stake in the ground until it faced the rock itself. If someone happened to check, they’d notice it had been redirected, but he was certain frying it would set off immediate alarms.
Then he got up, brushed away dust and the little bits of rock pocked into his hands and knees, shouldered his pack again, and continued upward. He found three more and disabled them in the same way before he reached the perimeter of the target zone.
Fergus could feel the faint signal of the core fragment, nearer than he’d expected, but it took him nearly twenty minutes to realize it was underfoot, underground. Glancing up the hill, he could easily imagine that it had gotten there via landslide.
He squatted down, pulled the lightweight folding trowel out of his pack that he’d been carrying since Burringurrah, and thought about how utterly inadequate it was. Nothing for it, he thought, and started trying to pry up rocks and carve out the hard-packed soil between him and the fragment. The piece was about half a meter down, which didn’t seem like much except that the effort-to-progress ratio was miserably low, and about ten centimeters down, he hit a rock large enough that he had to dig out a veritable pit around it just to get enough of a purchase to wiggle it free and haul it out.
His knees and back had a low opinion of that exercise. He took a break and nibbled at a nutrition bar as he again surveyed the area for suspicious signals. There was no sign of Mitch’s buddies, and he wondered if they were slacking off drunk somewhere or waiting eagerly for him on the section of road he’d bypassed to get there.
It took him more than two hours, and three more intransigent rocks, to finally reach the fragment. “Hello, number nine,” he greeted it as it sat in his hand, almost shouting at him. He slipped it into his zippered, lined pocket, and sat back, trying to decide if he should just leave the hole as is. In the end, the idea of leaving such obvious evidence of his activity—not to mention the questions it could raise about how, exactly, he located the fragment so precisely—was enough for him to shove the various rocks and dirt back into the hole and try to scuff out the obvious disturbance with his boot.
When it was good enough that one mild rain would make his dig undetectable, Fergus gathered up his things and started back down the hillside and the distant safety of the forest. It wasn’t nearly as fast going as in the inflatable ball, but the slope would have been too little and too irregular to get him any good speed, and without that and the element of surprise, it would have been a liability. So, more hiking it was.
He thought he was heading down the same way he’d come up, though the road had abandoned him nearly a kilometer farther down, but he realized he had strayed off target when he felt the distinct ping of a signal to his left, and looked over to see a sensor in the shadow of a boulder, facing right toward him.
“Shit,” he muttered. He scrambled as fast as he could downhill toward the tree line, three drones already coming in, low and from the south. It was going to be a close race.
As he pelted down the slope, he fumbled in his other pocket, where he had stashed a handful of alloy ball bearings, and wrapping his hand around them, concentrated as best he could under the circumstances to charge them with electricity. He’d had the idea on the Pan-Africa train, practiced on the way here from the Azores, and had discovered he could get a charge to stay in a bearing for about ninety seconds after letting it go, before it dissipated.
Either ninety seconds was more than enough, or it wouldn’t work at all.
Fergus reached the first tree of any size, catching it with one arm to slow himself as he pulled a slingshot and one of the charged bearings from his pocket with his free hand. He took a few precious seconds to check his footing and aim as a sleek drone, two gun barrels slung below its rotors, flew straight at him, barely twenty meters away.
He let the bearing fly and had a second one in the sling and ready to go when the first one hit a glancing blow to its underside, discharging its stored energy in that brief contact. The drone wobbled unevenly in the air, rotors faltering, when he tagged it solidly with a second bearing.
The drone took a nosedive into the hard ground, crumpling like a paper airplane hitting a wall, and did not move. He could sense the other two drones coming up over the trees, so he repocketed his sling and headed into the woods proper, staying far away from the exposed forestry road and under as much cover as he could.
Many times, he had to stop under a tree as the drones swept back and forth overhead, looking for movement; he was grateful for the chances to catch his breath, anyhow.
Somewhere to his left, there was the brief tingling of electronics. He stayed where he was, not moving, for a long time, eyes searching the cacophony of leaves and branches for any sign of the source. Finally, faintly, he heard a muffled sneeze, and his eyes immediately found the ever-so-slightly-off shifting camouflage of a birdwatcher’s blind about six meters off the ground in a tree. He would have walked right into its line of sight on his way in if he hadn’t gone around the moose.
Thank you, leftover ice-age mammalsaur, he thought.
As he was contemplating his best route that both avoided the blind and openings in the forest cover, he felt another brief blip downhill and heard sounds of movement.
Peter had told him DM was taking shifts. It looked like either the shift was changing, or backup was coming in to try to drive him out into the open or box him in. Either way, he had an advantage they couldn’t foresee. As long as they kept checking in with each other, he knew exactly where they were.
He slogged around the far edge of the bog, moving as quickly as he dared without making unnecessary noise, and slipped right past them without them ever knowing he was there.
By the time he got to his hidden moped, only one drone was still anywhere nearby, and not particularly near. He unburied the moped and rolled it to the very edge of the bike path, ditched his hat, and changed his jacket for a bright blue one. When a group of people, laughing and chatting, came past on a mix of scooters and bicycles, he made a show of putting his water bottle away and getting onto the path far enough behind them to not be creepy or put them in danger, but just close enough to plausibly look like a lagging member of the group.
Drones passed overhead twice, about twenty minutes apart, but did not seem any more interested in him than in the group as a whole, and that not much.
He returned the moped in Point au Mal and took a bus back to the Stephenville shuttleport. His sense of dread r
ose, the closer they got, and as he disembarked with a full busload of passengers and walked among them through the front gate into the main terminal building, he felt ridiculously exposed.
Mitch was not there, or at least not where Fergus could spot him, and he hoped this was just a bit of good luck rather than first indication of the next ambush.
Peter was also no longer on the bench. He glanced around to see if the man had just moved, but he was not anywhere in sight. Out following Mitch, he thought. I hope he stays out of trouble.
Fergus bought a ticket for a suborbital shuttle down the coast to Portland, leaving in about an hour. He meandered to the side of the main concourse and watched the flow of people around the terminal, and the progression of planes and shuttles coming and going outside the tall glass windows that lined the entire front of the building.
After twenty minutes or so, when a critical mass of water decided it was done hanging around, he went off to find the restrooms.
They were down a side corridor, away from the concourse, a line of individual booths with a few alien-configured ones at the end. As a fifteen-year-old runaway, he’d thought the idea of an alien toilet was the most fascinating thing ever, and he’d shut himself in one on Mars and pushed every single button to see what would happen, and not only shot himself in the eye with a jet of saline water but got his entire pants crotch dusted with some kind of cloying, heavily scented powder that took six runs through the laundry to finally wash out. Dru had made fun of him for it for weeks.
Fergus went to one of the regular booths that had its unoccupied light lit. As he was pushing the door open, he heard the muffled thumps and crashes of a scuffle one booth down. Pausing, he listened, and after a few moments decided it was definitely a fight, which someone was losing badly. The presumptive loser sounded a lot like Peter.
Shit, he thought. He stepped sideways to the other door, which was one of the alien-configured booths, and tried the handle, but the booth was locked with the occupied sign lit overhead. Either I’m about to do the right thing, or I’m about to commit an interstellar faux pas, he thought, and put his index finger against the lock and shorted it.
It crashed open from the inside and Peter fell out onto the floor, his face covered in blood, and Mitch lunged down to grab him and haul him back inside. “I don’t know anything!” Peter was crying, trying to squirm away. “I was just sitting there, minding my own business!”
“He bought you food!” Mitch roared, and he bent down and clasped his meaty hand on Peter’s throat, as Fergus delicately reached around the open door and put his own hand on Mitch’s back.
The techbro grunted and collapsed on top of Peter, an additional abuse but forgivable in the circumstances. Peter stared up at Fergus, blinking furiously around the blood in his swollen eyes, as Fergus knelt down and shoved the inert body of his unconscious assailant off and ungracefully to the floor.
“What did you hit him with?” Peter asked.
“Secret Space Police Secret Weapon,” Fergus said, patting his pocket as if he’d just returned something there. “Can’t tell you. You okay?”
“No,” Peter said.
“You need a minute, or you want to get out of here before applesauce-brain wakes up?”
Peter gave a weak smile. His lip was split, and he winced, but he held a hand out. “Help me up?” he said.
Fergus helped him up, shocked by how very little the man weighed and how weak he looked, trying to walk away from the booths as Fergus shoved Mitch back inside, quickly rifled the man’s pockets, and shut the door before catching up to the cultist. “Do you want me to call security?” he asked.
Peter shook his head no, then glanced down at the blood splattered on his white linen tunic. “Shit,” he said. “That is going to be murder to get out.”
“It almost was murder,” Fergus said. “And I guess it’s my fault again. I’m sorry.”
“No, no apologies, it was mine,” Peter said. “I was weak and accepted your gift of food. Twice. I have let down my faith by being tempted by bodily and material needs.”
Fergus took a handkerchief out of his bag and, getting it wet at the water fountain, tried to dab the worst of the blood off the man’s face. “You have to meet those needs at least a little bit; otherwise, you die,” he said.
“Not if my faith is strong enough,” Peter said. “The True are sustained by the fire from within and have no need of food or rest or material comforts. Fajra Mastro would be so disappointed in me.”
“The Fire Master?” Fergus asked. “You mean Barrett Granby, who started your . . . faith?”
Peter scowled at him. “That is the Mastro’s human name, yes. He has transcended it.”
The man was upset and had been beaten for the second time in a week, and Fergus didn’t want to laugh at him or make him feel like he was being mocked, so he handed the handkerchief to him instead. “Stay here,” he ordered.
Fergus went over to one of the many souvenir booths and came back with a blue sweatshirt with puffins on it.
“I don’t want that,” Peter said.
“You want to talk to security? Because if anyone reports you walking around covered in blood, you are going to be trying to explain a lot to them.”
“No,” Peter said. “Okay. But . . . help me?”
Fergus helped him pull the sweatshirt on, and the man was shaking with the effort and pain by the time they were done. But he looked warmer, anyway, and less ghastly with the blood out of sight.
“Look,” Fergus said, “I’m not trying to make you upset, but you do know that your Mastro is not exactly living an austere life? I mean, have you seen pics of his house?”
“The Temple in Kansas? I’ve been there twice in person,” Peter said. “It’s a tall stone tower, and the Mastro lives in a room on the top floor, with nothing but a bunk and a small desk, no food other than that brought by the faithful who have come on pilgrimage, and no heat other than that provided by the beacon flame atop the roof that he and his special acolytes tend, around the clock, between prayers. How is that not the very definition of austerity?”
Fergus had seen the tower, too, through a lot of 3-D scans uploaded by a disgruntled former cult member, and none of what Peter said was wrong. There was virtually nothing there, and certainly nowhere one could easily conceal fragments, but it did have a fire moat, which was a nice bit of extra theatrics.
“Do you have a reason to stay here?” Fergus asked instead.
“If you leave, Mitch will leave,” Peter said. “And when Mitch leaves, I have no reason to stay.”
“Where will you go next?”
Peter tried to shrug and gave up, gritting his teeth in pain. “Wherever my estro de la hejmo sends me, when he gets around to it. I will be patient until then.”
“So, how about I show you something?” Fergus said. “You’ll have to take a couple of shuttle hops with me, but if you’ve not got immediate apocalypse business to get to, I think you will want to see it.”
“What?” Peter asked.
“Your Mastro’s house.”
“The Temple? I already—”
“No,” Fergus interrupted. “His house. On a big private estate in the Republic of Nevada.”
“You are lying,” Peter said.
“Why would I?”
“Then you are just wrong!” the man yelled.
“So, come with me and prove it,” Fergus said. “I can bring you right back here, or wherever you want to go, after. It would take less than a day to get there. Would your Estro miss you that quickly?”
“No,” Peter said. “No, he would not.”
“It’s up to you,” Fergus said. He crossed his arms over his chest and regarded him. It would be far better for him and everyone if Peter said no, turned, and walked away . . . but Fergus wanted him to say yes, needed to show this poor abused man the fake wizard behind t
he curtain that he served.
Peter dabbed at his lip with the wet handkerchief and then looked at it and his own blood on it. He said something, too quiet for Fergus to hear, even standing so near, then coughed and said it again, louder. “Okay. I’ll go with you.”
Chapter 16
True to its reputation, Lake Tahoe was an almost-unworldly color of deep blue, benday-dotted with a myriad silver drought buoys that, at the height of the day when water levels were low, unfolded their shiny petals to reflect the sun back up and away. Right now, they were folded up, tiny cones keeping their formation as the surface undulated beneath them.
They were conspicuously absent from the lake nearer the private estates, evaporation and catastrophic drought being, apparently, less of a concern than the ire of the wealthy elite.
Peter had slept, if fitfully, on the shuttle from Portland to Reno, his injuries not letting him get too comfortable, and who knew what inner demons tormented someone who’d decided the world ending in fire was a best-case scenario? Still, he’d seemed marginally perkier, if that could ever be applied to the man, and had not fought Fergus ordering him food on the way.
He was still wearing his puffin sweatshirt and was hunched up in it despite the heat as if it was a layer of armor. The tour boat was slow, but the wind was brisk, and they stood near the railings, looking out over the lake with the other tourists, and at the sprawling mansions on the far shore. “That one,” Fergus said at last, and pointed. “The one with the big white marble pillars and the red yacht docked out front. According to the real estate data, fourteen bedrooms, a home movie theater that seats thirty-five, an indoor driving range, and a full-size nightclub dance floor. Mr. Granby has a part-time DJ listed as in his employ.”
Peter pursed his lips and stared. The tour boat continued along the shore, and the mansion itself slid out of view, though the red yacht stood out until it became too small to see. The man seemed to almost draw even further in on himself, if such a thing was possible, then he asked, “How do I know you’re not lying?”
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