The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Had,” the man corrected.

  “Have,” Fergus insisted.

  “You are one cocky bastard,” the man said. “And shut up, you with the la dee hah torture how boring schtick. We can find your family, your friends. What about those people in Scotland, above the bar? Kyle could pay them a visit.”

  “Them?” Fergus laughed. “Poor gullible people. Their long-dead cousin that everyone knows drowned shows up out the blue still alive, with some crazy-ass made-up-on-the-spur-of-the-moment story, and they bought it instantly. Gave me a good cover while I went to find the Doune Hill piece. You idiots had ten years, and it took me an afternoon. Probably takes you five years every time you have to find your own ass.”

  Roff snickered.

  “Here’s the thing,” the man snarled out, through gritted teeth. “None of the three of you are getting out of this. There’s only two lev-packs, and me and Nigel are taking them.”

  “There are eight standard on these hoppers,” Roff said.

  “Yeah, well, the boss was clear about his expectations, so we left six of them in the shrubs with your pilots,” the man said.

  “Then if we’re gonna die anyway, what’s our incentive to help you?” Hensley asked.

  “I got none,” Roff said.

  “Me either,” Hensley said.

  Fergus shrugged.

  The man waved his hands in aggravation. “You are the most annoying people I have ever met,” he said.

  “Thanks! It’s nice to have your efforts recognized,” Fergus said.

  “You are so lucky Mitch isn’t here—he’d have shot you in the face by now. After you pulled that stunt with his wallet at Granby’s, he’s got an entire fucking cult after him, trying to avenge their Mastro.” The man paused. “Actually, that’s a little bit funny, because he’s a jerk. But he’s one of us.”

  “How long until we crash?” Fergus asked. “Do I have time to use the bathroom?”

  “He pees a lot,” Roff said.

  “You’re about to die, and you’re worried about peeing?! What the fuck is wrong with you?” the man shouted.

  “We’re all going to die,” Fergus said, irrationally pleased with how frustrated the man was becoming. “You don’t think you’re going to get out of this yourself, do you? Because nuh-huh, no way, buttnuts.”

  Finally, the man couldn’t take it anymore, and stepped forward and smashed Fergus across the face with the side of his pistol. In the split second before it connected, Fergus stuck out one foot and kicked the man’s shin. In that moment of contact, he felt not only his own electricity flow across but the hunger of whatever was on the other side, trying to pull them both through a door that didn’t exist. Blood flew from his cheek and nose at the impact and sent him reeling hard against the seat restraint, at the same time as his assailant dropped like a stone and sprawled across the floor of the hopper. The pistol skittered down across the floor and under Roff’s seat.

  “What the . . .” Hensley asked.

  “Quick, before he wakes up,” Fergus said.

  She and Roff wasted no time getting out of their seats, then Roff got down on his hands and knees to pull the pistol out from where it had slid. “Okay, now let me out,” Fergus said.

  Hensley shook her head. “No fucking way.”

  “You need my help to get out of here,” Fergus said.

  “No, I really don’t,” she said. She went to the flight cabin door and knocked. “Nigel!” she called out, making her voice as deep as she could.

  “What the hell, Bruce? I’m trying to fly here, and the Alliance is on our fucking tail already!” came the muffled response.

  “We got a big problem. Monkeywrench is getting loose,” Hensley said.

  There was muffled swearing, then the door opened a crack, and Hensley shot through it without hesitation. There was a loud thump of a body hitting the floor. “Goddamn it,” Hensley said, and braced herself against the doorframe to kick the body out of the way enough to climb over Nigel into the cockpit.

  “She a pilot?” Fergus asked.

  “We’ve all had training,” Roff said. He bent over Bruce and checked his pulse. “Unconscious,” he said. “How’d you do that?”

  “Magical space ninja training. Seriously, can you please unlock me?” Fergus asked.

  “No,” Roff said. He put binders on Bruce’s wrists, too, and hauled him upright just enough to dump him in a seat next to Fergus. “And I don’t care if you have to pee; you’re not on their side, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean you’re on ours.”

  Fergus took a deep breath and let it out. He had really thought he was going to have to watch Hensley and Roff get murdered in front of him, and now that that possibility had dissipated, he was left with just unbearable thirst and a need to get out of this trap while he had the chance. Where his hands were squashed between his back and the interior hull of the hopper, he could feel the electricity running past, feel the network of lines and the bright spots of relays and components strung along it. It was so easy to send the tiniest spark in, the tiniest wave in an opposing frequency to disrupt the flow.

  The interior of the hopper went dark except for the fading light coming in through the open flight cabin door, and the engines and rotors let out a low groan as they slowed and eventually stopped. Only Fergus heard the tiny click of his seat harness unlocking.

  “Roff!” Hensley yelled over her shoulder as she pounded on the helm panel. “It’s gone dead!”

  Roff’s eyes never left Fergus’s face. “Call for help. Try to get us a midair pickup.”

  “Comms are down too,” she said.

  Roff now looked away, toward his partner, and Fergus used his shoulders to quietly shrug the seat harness up and away. Getting out of the binders would be harder because they had a mechanical component, but he had an idea about that, too. He managed to get to his feet just as Roff glanced back and realized he was loose. “Stop there!” Roff ordered.

  The hopper was now dropping, at a sharper and sharper angle, back toward the Earth. He had no idea how long they had, but the sky outside the window had gone back to blues, and that was not a good sign. Turbulence started bumping up under the hopper as its stabilizers failed to activate.

  Fergus swayed on a big bump and used the momentum of it to crash into Roff, and zap him in that brief contact. “Sorry, man,” he said. He knelt and felt Roff’s pockets until he found the remote for the cuffs and deactivated them. Hands free, he gently picked up the private and buckled him into one of the empty seats.

  “What’s going on back there?” Hensley called from the cockpit.

  Fergus shorted out the overhead bin lock and took out the small case of fragments, then opened the rear emergency storage locker, pulled out one of the two lev-packs in there, and buckled it around himself securely before putting on the face mask and breather pack. At this altitude, it was going to be a rough ride down.

  He could see the browns and greens of land slowly emerge through the thinning clouds below. They didn’t have much time, but there was enough for Hensley to pull out of the dive if the hopper wasn’t dead.

  Here goes nothing, he thought, hoping it’d be something. He’d always done this one way, shutting signals down, but maybe he could start it up, too? Otherwise, he didn’t think a single lev-pack could handle both their weight, which meant he was leaving at least one of Hensley and Roff to die. That wasn’t an acceptable cost at all. Putting the palm of his hand against the bulkhead, he tried to kick the electrical systems into rebooting.

  Lights flickered, then the self-repair systems took over, and in seconds, the hopper was fully online and Hensley was pulling the nose up again. He let out his breath. Looked like he wasn’t going to get anyone killed after all.

  Inside the case, the fragments were singing in unison, a song of welcome and joy, trying to fold him into their harmonies. He was runni
ng out of time.

  “Good luck, Hensley. Tell Roff I’m sorry!” Fergus called, then opened the hopper door and leapt out into the vast, fragile, precious skies of Earth.

  Chapter 21

  Fergus landed somewhere in a farm field, surrounded by deciduous trees with a few evergreens sprinkled among them. A temperate zone, at any rate; he didn’t know enough about crops to pick out any except the corn among the mosaic of plants around him. As soon as he was safely on the ground, he shorted out the lev-pack’s systems; they were designed to be highly traceable, for all the obvious reasons, and for just as obvious ones, he wasn’t personally keen on that emergency feature.

  It wouldn’t take them too long to find him, regardless. Running, right now and as fast and as far as he could, was the best chance he had. The fragments in the case were speaking to him in dreamlike synchronicity, cajoling him to join them and become whole, but always also there was that other noise on the far side, straining for that door to open.

  The hopper had disappeared out of sight over the horizon, but he didn’t hear any sound of explosion and hoped that meant Hensley had pulled up in time. He carried a lot of lives on his conscience, some justifiably so and some not, but he didn’t want to add those two.

  At the edge of the field, he found an irrigation channel and dropped both the dead pack and his stolen Alliance uniform into it.

  By the position of the sun, and how long it had been since he’d stepped into the Digital Midendian compound, he was still in North America, probably somewhere near the middle. His sense of time, and time of day, was badly confused after a nearly endless series of planet-hops and far too little sleep, but it seemed midafternoon.

  He walked for about forty-five minutes along the edges of the field until he spotted an old barn with most of its roof collapsed in. The doors on the end were open and mostly off their hinges, so it was easy to step into what shelter remained and look around in the bright lines of sunlight streaming through the cracks in the barn boards.

  There were the rusty remains of a tractor, long since past any measure of even creaky mobility, and a number of other, decrepit farm tools on rotted handles piled around it. Other things around it were less identifiable, moldy shapeless sacks with their contents long since depleted or smuggled away by wildlife.

  Behind it all, in the very back, was an old ice cream van. The tires had long since moved on to their promised road in the great beyond, and it was rusty enough that it wasn’t much less grim than the tractor, but when he hauled open the door with an ear-splitting squeal of rust and metal on metal, the interior was dry, empty, and free of the stink of rodents that permeated the rest of the barn.

  Fergus climbed in, shut the door, and set the case of fragments inside one of the old ice cream coolers, where their chatter was at least somewhat muffled, then curled up in the dust on the floor for a much-needed nap. It would be easier to move when night fell, anyhow, and who knew when the opportunity to safely rest would come again, or what trouble lay between him and orbit. After that, he was sure sleep would be the least of his worries.

  * * *

  —

  It turned out that Fergus’s biggest worry, three days later as he snuck through the service corridors between the Kelly Station orbital security zones, was whether or not he could be arrested for odor. He had a concourse and a half to cross before he could get out to the berth transports and back to Whiro for a shower, and he was fairly sure his clothing was now legally classifiable as a biological weapon.

  Beggars couldn’t be choosers, he thought, when what you’re begging for is a free ride up to Earth orbit without being noticed, and stowing away on an automated farm transport had been a stroke of luck. If only it had been transporting corn, or wheat, or some other innocuous produce, but no; his luck never, ever ran 100% good.

  Of all the things to ship into space, though, heirloom goats seemed a ridiculous choice. On the other hand, they had been conveniently easy to hide among and kept him warm, and the only real challenge in getting away had been keeping the herd, who now clearly considered him an honorary member, from trying to follow him out.

  He’d circumvented at least six different security points before he got to the rental locker where he’d stashed his exosuit and a handful of other things, and now there was just one more door between him and the concourse where he could catch the local transport out to Whiro’s berth. Please let it go smoothly, he thought. For once?

  The door alarm was easily disabled with the confuddler, no crude zapping necessary, and after listening at the door long enough to be pretty sure no one was nearby, he pushed it open and stuck his head out to look.

  Standing in the center of the concourse, directly across from the door, was one of Digital Midendian’s guys, staring right at him. Their eyes met. Before Fergus could ditch back into the corridor, the man raised both his hands to show he wasn’t holding a gun. “The boss wants to talk,” the man said. “He told me to say please.”

  Fergus raised one eyebrow.

  “Please,” the man growled, clearly unaccustomed to the words. “Eventually, you’ll have to say yes, unless you wanna die of old age hiding in the walls. Mr. Derecho is persistent.”

  In the back corridors, they could eventually hunt him down and kill him. At least out in public he had a fighting chance, right? Honestly, he’d expected Derecho to be stuck in an Alliance cell right now.

  The man gestured for Fergus to follow, and as Fergus reluctantly stepped out of the service door and let it close and relock with a snick behind him, wrinkled his nose. “What is that smell?” he asked.

  “That’s Gobber, Gabriel, Dahlia, and Isis,” Fergus said, as other people walking through the hallway crossed to the far side to put some distance between him and them. “You can’t always choose your traveling company.”

  The man just grunted and let Fergus follow him, trusting him not to run. Which probably meant he knew more than Fergus did about his chances of getting away successfully. For now, it was best to play along. And, he had to admit, he was curious what Derecho might have to say to him.

  And anyway, the more he walked around, the more people noticed him and his noteworthy odor in passing. Attention would complicate escape but also any murder attempts.

  Evan Derecho was sitting on a stool at the counter of the Deli Gute Esn. If that was coincidence or another message, it wasn’t clear. Kyle and Mitch stood behind him. They both looked uncomfortable and ridiculous, large men perched on such tiny stools in their suits and glowers, but Derecho was relaxed, in a black business suit with the tie undone, leaning one elbow on the bright blue counter top. “Come join me,” he said, and indicated the empty stool beside him. “Everything is on camera here, though no audio; it is the closest I could come to neutral territory on short notice.”

  Fergus sat. His nameless escort stood outside the door, blocking it.

  “Coffee?” Derecho asked.

  “Sure,” Fergus said.

  Derecho snapped his fingers, and Kyle got up and walked around behind the counter, pouring a mug full from the pot. He set it in front of Fergus with just enough of a thump to splatter hot coffee on his hand, but the man either didn’t notice or didn’t care. If looks could kill, Fergus would be no more than a smear of paste on the floor. “Thanks,” he said anyway.

  Derecho held up his arm, where a wristband gleamed across his skin. “House arrest,” he said. “Well, planetary arrest. I’m supposed to get my ass back to Earth and stay there until they’ve finished gutting my business and deciding what they can charge me with that’ll stick. But the Alliance isn’t so uncivilized as to deny a man out on bail a decent lunch, nor so attentive as to notice when I buy out the place for half an hour for a personal meeting. So, here we are. I’m afraid if you want a sandwich, you’re out of luck.”

  “I did, kinda, but I’ll live,” Fergus said. Since when did the Alliance let people out on bail?
Since those people aren’t you or your friends or other people who have no money, he thought wryly. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  Derecho tapped the side of his mug. “I have built an empire on educated guesses, and there weren’t that many ships coming up from Earth that you could plausibly be on,” he said. “Also, I helped build out parts of the security system on this station.”

  “That figures,” Fergus said. “What do you want?”

  “Ideally, I’d like you to come work for me,” Derecho said. Mitch growled under his breath at that. “You’re resourceful, persistent, smart, and I’m sure we can clear up any bad impressions among my other personnel.” He glanced briefly but meaningfully toward Mitch. “It’s just our bad luck we started out working against each other. Clearly, you know more about the artifact pieces than the rest of us, given how easily you breezed through the impossible task of finding them, and if we pool our knowledge, we could crack the technology there. Think how transformative, how lucrative that could be. I’m betting you don’t have the infrastructure to monetize this yourself, so you need a partner anyway.”

  Fergus sighed. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “So is fire, but we’ve harnessed it, made it a tool, a thing we control,” Derecho said, then laughed. “As long as you don’t claim to worship it, I guess.”

  “What was it between you and Granby, anyway?” Fergus asked. “I never did figure it out.”

  “I was briefly in a relationship with his sister,” Derecho said. “It didn’t end amicably. That’s also how he found out about the pieces, originally, through her. I could have found a way to work with him, found things I could use him for, if he’d insisted on a cut-in, but no, he couldn’t see past his own resentments to cooperate. You’re not like him, though. And that’s what I’m saying: together, you and I, we can own this technology, own the world. That must sound good to you.”