The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  “There are rules to the disclosure of party activity,” Whiro said. “The role of a character in-game allows for certain discreet actions, as long as no harm is involved or accidentally incurred, that do not need to be subject to the normal operating parameters of a player.”

  Fergus stared up at the ceiling, which is how he pictured Whiro’s presence, since the ship’s voice came from up there. “I have concerns about that,” he said.

  “In the interests of expediency on the larger urgent matter, I suggest you leave them for later,” Whiro said.

  If the solar system got destroyed, he supposed it didn’t matter if a group of ships had figured out a way to justify being dishonest with their crews. And hell, maybe a certain amount of dishonesty is a fundamental right of all beings, he thought. Having now met a sentient artificial mindsystem on Enceladus whose ability to selectively withhold information or misrepresent itself was critical to its own survival, not to mention how often it had been essential to his own, he wasn’t too keen on jumping in to draw lines.

  As Whiro had said, there was a more urgent matter. “So, okay, you have the Autumn Moon as part of your new quest party. To steal something? They aren’t even stationed near Earth, from what you say.”

  “This time, the challenge is to sneak something in,” Whiro said.

  “Such as?”

  “I have created a template file for a 3-D printer for an object containing select information, such as the Librarians provided to us. In this case, we would embed all the evidence we have of Digital Midendian’s activities, including the likely murders of more than one human person to obtain fragments ahead of the Alliance’s own team.”

  Fergus laughed. “Ah! So, Autumn Moon prints the object in the guise of its character, which means it does not, as a player, need to necessarily disclose its role in producing the object or where the plans came from.”

  “And, to fulfill its quest, places it surreptitiously on the desk of its captain,” Whiro said, “where it will immediately arouse curiosity and attention without being alarming.”

  “What’s the object?”

  “A mug. It bears the slogan ‘World’s Best Boss,’ ” Whiro said.

  “I could kiss you,” Fergus said. “That’s brilliant.”

  “Please do not,” Whiro said. “Instead, I suggest you prepare yourself to go meet the Luna bus, and I will send along a small drone with you so that, once you have retrieved the thirteenth piece, you can dispatch it back to me discreetly and then proceed to the Alliance Terrestrial Sciences facility in Baltimore. Do not forget the resupply of cleaner bots we picked up for you on Titan; they were not cheap. I will coordinate with you to initiate the quest when you are adequately positioned to take advantage of the Terrestrial Sciences Facility shutting down all Digital Midendian–provided security. They will have their own security systems, but they are likely out of date and inferior to DM’s, and will be put back into service with suboptimal haste. It is the best opportunity we can provide, but there are no guarantees. From there, you are on your own.”

  “That’s how it always ends up, me and just me,” Fergus said. Truth was, he liked it that way. “Can you drop all the data you have so far on the Terrestrial Sciences Unit and Digital Midendian—especially its founder, Evan Derecho—to my handpad? If I’m going to be stuck on a bus, might as well get caught up on who and what I’m up against. Sorry, Mister Feefs.”

  He gently detached the cat from his shirt and got up to pack what he needed. This could all go terribly, disastrously wrong, but it also could just work—should work, if the universe properly appreciated beautiful plans—and he didn’t have the time or energy to doubt. And anyway, he had a whole bus ride to figure out the details.

  * * *

  —

  Sitting at the counter of the Deli Gute Esn on Kelly Station, Fergus knew when Francesco’s courier had arrived without needing to be informed. The core fragment entered his consciousness like someone slowly inserting a dart through his skull into the back of his brain. So much louder, he thought, dismayed.

  It was no surprise when Bad Yuri took the stool next to him, though he got a raised eyebrow at having already ordered the man coffee that was deposited in front of him by the robotic server almost before Yuri’s butt had even fully made contact with the blue vinyl stool. The man was mostly back to his usual appearance, though Fergus noted with a small bit of pride that he’d kept a tiny goatee, now bright red. His T-shirt had a matching, animated red demon on it that occasionally stuck its tongue out.

  “Thanks for coming,” Fergus said.

  “De nada,” Yuri said. “No chance of sunburn this time.”

  Their food arrived and they ate in companionable silence. When he finished, Yuri made a pretense of wiping crumbs from his goatee with his napkin before placing the napkin in a heap between them. Fergus could hear the fragment singing from beneath it, but the sleight of hand had been flawless. “It is an odd thing,” Yuri said at last.

  “Yes,” Fergus answered.

  “I fear you did not exaggerate the danger,” Yuri said. “I must get back to my normal role, but I wish you success, for all our sakes. And thank you for the lunch.”

  “It was my pleasure,” Fergus said. Yuri got up from the stool, patted him once on the back, and departed. Fergus slid the napkin closer to himself as he finished his own sandwich, and ordered cinnamon rugelach for dessert. If anyone was watching for suspicious activity in the station, it was best not to both suddenly depart at the same time. And anyway, he had sent Whiro the details of the plan he’d come up with on the ride in from Mars, and was now contemplating all the actions that would have to fall together perfectly for it to work. Despite himself, he felt unreasonably good about it, and found himself humming along happily between bites of rugelach.

  There was a small scraping noise from under the napkin, and he glanced at it as it seemed to move, just slightly, toward him. Oh, hell, no, you just didn’t, he thought, and slapped his hand down on top of the napkin.

  It sang at him, full operatic electrical noise that felt like it had plucked his spinal cord like a bass string. Before he could lift his hand again, he felt something else, something at the very edge of his perception like a whine just barely within the range of hearing. Touching the napkin again with one finger, he tried to quiet that new noise, but it seemed to be coming not from the fragment itself but through it. And he had the sudden, unshakable impression that it felt him.

  Not it, they, he suddenly knew. Millions and millions of they. The enemy that had, until this moment, only been an abstract threat fully detached from Fergus’s reality.

  The Vraet. Waiting, impatiently.

  Chapter 19

  Baltimore was a city that had seen many ups and downs in its long lifetime, the best of its ups only so for a subset of its people, and the worst of its downs for a different subset entirely. The twenty-fifth century, though, had been more egalitarian in its kindness, perhaps because the devastation of the previous few centuries had also favored no one, and those who hadn’t been able or willing to adapt to a mindset of all being in it together had fled for other cities or fledgling North American nations.

  It had been the thriving music scene, seemingly impervious to the ebbs and flows of fortune or time, that had kept the city’s identity grounded through it all. Now music and art, hand in hand, brought the city to life. He came in on a ferry from New Virginia Beach, through the locks at the seawall at Sparrow’s Point, into a rebuilt, mural-garbed waterfront practically glowing with color and sound.

  The city felt almost unbearably alive. Remembering the feel of that whine carried through the Moon fragment, now safely dispatched via drone to Arelyn, Fergus shivered on the deck of the ferry even though the sun was strong and the salt-seasoned wind not enough to break its warmth.

  Stepping off the ferry onto the dock, he let the city warm him up again, not looking aroun
d to see if the tiny cloud of highly illegal bots he’d dumped into the wind over the ferry’s side during the chaos of docking were dispersing as they should; they’d work, or they wouldn’t. Instead, he bought some kebabs from a food cart and let the street musicians carry him, one tune blending into another, down the brick and stone pedestrian roads, to a small shop where he had arranged for the rental of a utility van.

  All city traffic—what little was allowed, other than emergency and assistance vehicles and public transportation—was centrally controlled, so he climbed in back as his van took him to the parking lot he’d specified on the dash console. As it drove, he pulled a bright red worksuit with an entirely fictional company’s logo imprinted on it out of his pack and pulled it on over his shorts and T-shirt.

  The van system notified him that they had arrived at the lot. It had the distinction of being a lot frequently used to park autobuses in reduced ridership times. The buses were tall and plentiful, and provided a very convenient incidental cover from the few city cams—limited by the Global Citizens Privacy Act of ’98—watching the streets for trouble. He wasn’t worried about doing anything to get their attention, but he also didn’t want anyone backtracking through the feed later to find him too easily.

  He got out and unrolled a cling decal with a logo matching his workalls, smoothing it across the blank white side of the van. One more on the other side, one on the rear door, and he climbed back in and directed the van to take him across the city to an electronics supply shop. It was a perfectly reasonable place for a van from Griffin Electricians to be, and it shared a common wall with a bank, which, if he was a bank robber, would be a very crude way of going about his business, especially in the middle of the day. Fortunately for both himself and the bank, he had no interest in the bank’s treasury whatsoever.

  On the other hand, he was very interested in the bank’s electricity.

  Like most of the buildings in modern cities, this one generated almost all of its own electrical need from solar panels and wind turbines on the roof, or drew from batteries that stored and shared excess throughout the street block. However, banks being banks, there was always paranoia about what would happen if, by some poor luck, there was ever a sag or full lapse in power. Along with hospitals, fire stations, and other high-need or high-security institutions, the bank was tied into a dedicated emergency power grid that ran under the streets throughout the city to keep continual power to things that needed it.

  As Fergus walked around inside the supply store, picking up a few things here and there, putting some back, putting others in his basket, he listened to the electricity in the walls, and the different pitch of the dedicated line was almost laughably easy to find, running up on the other side of the shared wall behind a display of a dizzying array of crimpers.

  He reached for one the bins, let his hand slide over it to touch the wall beneath the next shelf up, right where he could sense the line, and pressed a dot the size of a pencil eraser to the wall. Then he wandered the store a little more, found a new wire lead that would be a perfect replacement for one on his confuddler that was starting to wear, paid for his stuff and left.

  Across the street and down a few buildings was the Alliance Terrestrial Sciences Unit Facility. It stood on its own, had no shared walls, and was tucked inside a perimeter fence, but it was connected to the same section of the dedicated line. Fergus was careful not to look that way as he put his purchases in his van; he’d studied the building from satellite and ground cam views enough that he didn’t really need to, anyway.

  It was nearly lunchtime. Fergus grabbed a smartbook from the seat in the van and went into a small Sonoran cafe, ordered himself a plate of enchiladas, and sat back in his booth to read his book and take his time eating and relaxing.

  He had a tiny earpiece in, invisible to anyone not staring directly into his ear, and he’d barely started to eat when Whiro’s voice whispered at him. “The bots are distributed and are now randomly testing the facility’s external security in a single network packet ping, logging the parameters of response to benchmark DM’s automated systems,” Whiro said from somewhere back in Earth’s orbit. “August Moon has let us know that their captain has gone into conference with the Neptune base, which is closest to their current position, and is bouncing traffic at top-priority speed back to Earth via jump packets. Already we are seeing significant activity at the Alliance orbital and early indications of an impending deployment. Blue Ivory preceded us back here.”

  “Hmmm-mmm,” Fergus mumbled. “This is good.”

  “Yes,” Whiro said. “I will keep you informed.”

  Fergus went back to his book and his lunch. Timing was everything here, but if he got it right, he didn’t need to hurry. If he got it wrong, he was going to have to eat a lot of enchiladas. That wasn’t the worst fate he’d contemplated by far.

  He was on his last glorious forkful when Whiro spoke again. “Go,” the ship said.

  Fergus reached into his coverall pocket and pressed the tiny button there. Down the street, the dot he’d stuck to the wall in the supply store activated, sending out a very localized, short-range EMP blast not enough to register even a few aisles away but more than enough to disrupt the relays of the dedicated electrical grid inside the wall.

  Whiro’s one-word message meant the bots had just recorded a sudden jump in response time and a variance in connection annihilation, meaning the facility had just shut down the DM-supplied portion of their security system, presumably pending a review of the evidence of treachery coming in from August Moon.

  And if you shut one thing off and other things go down at the same time too, you assume they’re connected, Fergus thought. Like your front gate, and your security cameras, and all the things that are supposed to be uninterruptable. You panic because you’re mostly scientists, not soldiers, and you look around to see who you can grab in a pinch . . .

  Eleven minutes later, a breathless, older man in casual clothes, an Alliance ID/tracker pinned on his collar, ran into the cafe and looked around, his eyes settling quickly on Fergus. “You!” he cried. “Is that your van out front?”

  “Yeah,” Fergus answered, as he dabbed his protobeard with a napkin. “You didn’t hit it, did you?”

  “We have an emergency,” the man said. “We need your help.”

  “I’m on my lunch—” Fergus started to say, but the man actually came over and tugged on his arm.

  “This is a planetary emergency, and we’re the government, and I don’t care if you charge us a thousand times your regular rate for a thousand times your actual hours, if you would just please come with me!” he pleaded.

  “Okay, then,” Fergus said. “Calm down; I’ll come look.”

  He paid his bill at the table kiosk and followed the man out back into the street. The man started to cross, but Fergus hung back. “My van?” he asked.

  “Gate is stuck,” the man said, pointing down at the Terrestrial Sciences facility. “Can you, you know, just carry your tools?”

  “Sure, but I don’t know what I need yet,” Fergus said. “You haven’t told me anything. Not even your name.”

  “I’m Phil,” he said. “We had a, um, unreliable component in one of our security systems, and when we took it down for examination, a lot of other things went down that shouldn’t have. Like the gate.”

  “Okay, hang on,” Fergus said. He climbed into his van and grabbed his bag and a large toolbox, then obligingly followed the panicking man over to the smaller door in the fence that had been wedged open.

  A guard was there in Alliance uniform. “Uh, Dr. Orchard, this man hasn’t been secured—”

  “This man is an electrician who just let me ruin his lunch to drag him over here,” Phil said. “I’ll keep an eye on him. We can’t wait for Orbital HQ.”

  From the guard’s expression, this was exactly as he’d expected this conversation to go, but had felt it nece
ssary to try to do his job despite that. Grumbling, he pulled out a small handpad. “Your name?” he asked Fergus.

  “Guy Griffin,” he said, and pointed at the logo on his own workall. “Electrician. You need my license?”

  “No,” the guard said, sighing. He signed Fergus in, then reached out and pinned a visitor ID/tracker to his collar. “Keep that on at all times, and hand it in when you leave.”

  “Sure,” Fergus said, and then, bureaucracy satisfied, the guard stepped aside, and Phil led him quickly through. The double doors of the two-story facility opened on a small reception desk and an atrium open to the glass roof, the floor lined with pedestal cases of assorted meteorites and other space debris, including what appeared to be a Bomo’ri jumpspace probe. The actual, assuming it was real, because Fergus was pretty sure if humanity had pinched a second, the Bomo’ri would have kicked the crap out of their entire species for it; they hadn’t ever forgiven humankind for stealing the first and their jumpspace technology along with it.

  Fergus owed all his adventures in the stars to that one stolen probe, and he desperately wanted to ask Phil if it was the real thing, but he was just some random guy off the street who shouldn’t know or care.

  Phil noticed his attention anyway and stopped. “Nice rocks and space stuff,” Fergus said, and then shrugged and caught up with the scientist at the staircase on the far side of the atrium.

  “Elevator’s offline too,” Phil said, and led him down the stairs into the basement. There were two other people there already, one of them a guard in uniform. “I found an electrician,” Phil told them.

  “Great,” one of the civilians said. She held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Williams, she/her, and director of the facility. Did you show your license at the gate?”

  “I offered,” Fergus said.

  “The guard said he didn’t need to see it,” Phil added.

  “Well, I do,” Dr. Williams said, and Fergus took the ID chit out of his pocket and handed it to her. She pulled a small handheld out of her pocket and scanned it, then handed his chit back. “Mr. Griffin?” she said.