Finder

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Hold tight,” Fergus said. He hooked one boot around a standing pole behind him, took hold of the crank handle to keep himself steady, and punched the mechanical release.

  The howl of the car decompressing was a physical blow as its entire cargo of atmosphere and crates was sucked out into the dark. He closed his eyes. If I’m going to get hit, he decided, I don’t want to see it coming.

  It was not the wallop of a crate but a gentle hand on his shoulder that made him jump. He opened his eyes to see Mother Vahn floating beside him. “Our turn,” she said.

  He looked out the open door at the scatter trail of crates curling in a spiral line around the car. As he watched, the line deformed, straightening itself, and began to stretch away. Tiny green lights flickered on and off among them.

  “Homing smartware,” she said as if reading his mind, “and tampering self-destruct. They’ll either make their own way back to the farm or give anybody who intercepts them a bit of a surprise. They’re not my worry anymore—we are. Whatever they’ve got out there, they’re lighting it up.”

  Out the far windows he could now make out the heat signature of the device and easily a dozen people around it. “Got it,” he said, and using his grip on the bar for leverage, he swung himself out into space. The old woman sailed out gracefully behind him.

  “Once they realized we’ve fled, they’ll leave, and we should be safe,” she said. “Can you get yourself back to the cable up-line on your own?”

  He could no longer see her. “Yeah, though it’s going to take me a few minutes,” he answered. His exosuit had a limited directional push capability, and he used it to stop the slow spin he was in. Then he pointed himself on a long diagonal toward the cable. Once he got moving, he’d keep going until he reached it.

  Around them, Cernee was a scattering of distant lights.

  “I hate to say it,” he said, “but we’re sitting ducks out here.”

  “Ducks?”

  “It’s a, like a . . .” Something a very long way away from here, he thought. “Like a chicken that floats on water? You must have chickens even out here. Never mind. I just mean we’re vulnerable.”

  “No one would dare risk damaging the cable system, not even Gilger,” she said. “Only things worse you can do around here are crack a sunshield, puncture a hab, or mess with the sewage bots.”

  Movement caught his eye, and he found her at last in the place he least expected: pulling herself along the cable car, green glowing lines in her wake. A momentary panic gripped him that he’d been the butt of some trick, stuck out here with a long haul back to anyplace with air. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I want to see what they’re up to. Once I reach the cable myself, I’ll get a good quick look at that device, and then I’ve got a fast spider that’ll get us ou—”

  A brilliant flash blinded him, fast enough that his goggles couldn’t compensate in time, and he flung his arm up over his eyes as tiny suns danced and swarmed in his vision. Pinprick icicles stung his side, and red lights flared all over his peripheral display. Suit breach!

  It had been a long time, but it wasn’t a feeling you forgot. Where a moment ago it had felt like ice, now his skin burned; his exosuit was trying to repair itself, and burned skin was better than a dead body. It was an agonizing few moments before the topical sedative the suit had released took effect and numbness set in. Whatever had torn his exosuit must have been small.

  “Well, shoot,” Mother Vahn said. “I never thought he’d go that far. Are you alive, Mr. Ferguson?”

  “Nothing that won’t seal or heal,” he said. He blinked, afterimages in his vision from the blast ruining his ability to make out anything. His own fault for not having better goggles. “What was that?”

  “Shrapnel cannon.” Her signal was fainter. “Hit my suit’s power supply. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

  “Hold on, I’m coming back—”

  “Don’t, Mr. Ferguson. You need to use whatever juice you’ve got to get as much distance from here as you can. I found the EMP mine, and it’s got a secondary explosive charge. I guess they don’t want any evidence.”

  “But . . .”

  “Since I’m unlikely to see you again, promise me that when you go repo whatever it is of Gilger’s you came for, you’ll give him my love? Preferably with a space boot up his backside, hard enough to kick him all the way up to his tiny brain.”

  “I—”

  “I can see you’re not moving yet, Fergus Ferguson. You get yourself out of here now,” she said, and again he heard the ghost of his maimeó.

  “There’s got to be another way,” he said. He had a spare air bottle, enough for them both if he moved fast enough, right? “Use your spider, and I’ll meet you—”

  The cable car blew, a single brief, orange ball instantly extinguished in the dark.

  He cried out as he turned his face away. A thin arc of light bent and curved ahead of him, growing and slipping sideways. With horror he realized it was the distant starlight reflecting off the curve of one of the severed cables, which was whipping straight toward him.

  Panicking, he thumbed his suit jet too hard and sent himself into a spin. Bloody amateur! He swore, trying to restabilize. The cable loomed closer as he spun, and then it brushed past, sweeping over one knee and thigh with enough impact to send him hurtling off in a new direction. He had to close his eyes to keep the wildly oscillating universe around him from making him sick.

  At long last, when he got his motion under control, he found he had been flung well out of the cable path and away from Mezzanine Rock. Two of his suit’s power cells were offline, and the lone remainder was nearly depleted. When it went, there would go his oxygen and heat, and his life.

  Well, shit, he thought. Now what?

  As if in answer, ahead of him he saw a small green light blinking steadily like a beacon. If he burned most of what his suit had left, he could just catch up to it.

  There was nothing else. He’d better not miss.

  When his lazy spin pointed him the right way, he hit his jet again. It was just beginning to splutter and die when he reached out and, like a man clinging to flotsam after his oceanship had gone down, wrapped his arms around the homing crate.

  “I don’t know where your lichen farm is, Mother Vahn,” he said out loud to the dark and the stars, “but I hope it’s not too far, and I hope you’ve left a key under the mat.”

  He turned on his gloves’ mag-grips to fasten himself securely to the side of the crate, then set his suit to maximum oxygen conservation. Immediately he began to feel drowsy. His last thought as he drifted off was that if he survived, he was going to find Arum Gilger. And when he did . . .

  He had a job to do—always and only the job. Get in, look around, do what you need to do, and above all, try not to make it personal. But now it was much more than that.

  Chapter 2

  Fergus’s first fully-formed thought was that he was unpleasantly cold, followed by a detached curiosity as to whether that was because he was now a frozen corpse stuck to a crate of lichen floating through space. Can you be uncomfortable, he wondered, and dead at the same time? If so, that seemed unfair.

  His fingernails cut half moons into his palms, and he forced himself to loosen his fists. It was a long, formless moment before he connected fingernails on flesh with no gloves, then no gloves and cold all over with naked. His eyes popped open into searing light.

  “He’s awake,” a woman’s voice said.

  There was some gravity, probably from spin. His hands splayed out on the floor beneath him—cold, rough-textured, unyielding—and still blinded, eyes streaming tears, he tried to sit up. A hand shoved him roughly back down. “Question time. We’ll know if you’re lying.”

  Only if I’m very bad at it, he thought. The light dimmed, and he could now make out the pale blobs of his arms and legs, and
was glad to know he’d been left his undershorts, if nothing else. “Okay,” he said. “Ask away.”

  “Where’s Mother? How much is Gilger paying you? Who do you think you are? Who sent you? Where are you from?” The questions seemed to come from all around him at once, women’s voices rushing over themselves like a disorganized echo. He shook his head, made an effort to see and understand. Blurry faces surrounded him. He focused on the one front and center. The woman was so similar to Mother Vahn that as soon as he’d discarded (more firmly this time) the “dead” hypothesis, he realized he must be at the Vahn farm. Nearly identical, yes, but not quite as ancient-looking. Daughter?

  Then he took in the rest of the faces. The similarity went beyond family resemblance and into the uncanny: they might well have been the same person except for their clothing and the span of their ages. What the hell? he thought. Clones?

  He didn’t know cloning tech was that good.

  The youngest of the Vahns was holding a giant pitchfork, braced and pointed in his direction. She had the expression of someone contemplating the joys of immediate violence.

  The light flared again, emanating from a square hatch set in the floor not fully shut. It lasted just long enough to make his eyes water. Rotation, he thought; the brightness must be the intervals when they faced the unshielded star outside.

  “Please,” he said, and that seemed to be enough for them to let him sit up. “I only just arrived here today, and I met Mattie Vahn on the cable car just before it was attacked. She saved my life. I couldn’t save hers. I’m sorry. I am not your enemy.”

  “So you say,” a middle-aged Vahn said. “Prove it.”

  “And how do I do that? We barely spoke before the car was attacked. She told me about her farm, and she gave me some glowy goo—you have my suit gloves, you at least can verify that.”

  The woman in front of him glanced back at two of the others, a perfectly matched set. “Macie? Minnie?”

  One of the twins nodded. “That’s true.”

  The woman turned back to him. “Is Mother really dead?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry,” he said.

  After a long silence, the woman let out a long, unsteady breath. “Tell us what happened.”

  “Can I have my pants back?”

  “No.” The young woman holding the pitchfork shook it in his direction.

  Moving with deliberate care, he pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, hoping to conserve at least some body heat. He told them about boarding the cable car, his conversation with the old woman already on board, and the events from there as best he could.

  “Why did Mother stay at the car after you exited?” Pitchfork Girl asked.

  “She told me the attackers wouldn’t risk damaging the cable system. She wanted to see what they were up to and thought she could still get out in time,” Fergus said. He vividly remembered the brief glimpse he’d had of her before the cannon went off and the bright green lines on the outside of the car beside her. The memory snapped into focus. “Uh, and also, she may have been writing an obscene message on the outside of the car in glowing goo.”

  The lead woman put her hand to her forehead. “That’d be just like her,” she said. “Did she say who attacked you?”

  “She named Arum Gilger.”

  “Did you see him or the faces of anyone who attacked you? Any identifying marks on their suits? Color stripes?”

  “No, nothing,” Fergus said. “I could hardly make out the silhouette of the cannon, much less anyone with it. They stayed dark until they got where they wanted to be, which was only as close as they needed to fire.”

  “Damn,” Pitchfork Girl said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “And you? What’s your name?” the lead woman asked.

  “Fergus Ferguson.”

  “You’re not local. Why are you here?”

  Telling one little old woman alone in a cable car hadn’t seemed risky. But a whole family of strangers? “I pose you no threat,” he said.

  “Yes, well, Mother is dead, and you’re not,” Pitchfork Girl said. “You have to answer better than that.”

  “Look, I’d rather not—” he started to say, then found the fork wavering centimeters from his face. Hell. “I came here looking for something that was stolen. If you let me go do my job, I think you’ll find I’m going to cause this Mr. Gilger a great inconvenience.”

  “Seems like he’s the one who inconvenienced you,” she snapped.

  “I assure you I’ll do better,” he said, stung.

  “Mari,” the lead woman said, “put the pitchfork down and give Mr. Ferguson his pants back. I’m not worried about him trying to escape, and I’m sick of watching him shiver.”

  Mari bobbed her head. “Yes, Mauda,” she said, then reached behind a crate and flung his pants at him.

  He caught them and stood up, grimacing at the pain from his injuries, and slipped them back on. They were so cold he wondered if they’d put them in a freezer. Ignoring the chill as best he could, he sat back down on the floor, willing warmth back into his body. “What do I have to do to get my socks back?” he asked.

  “Gilger and his crew have been after us for a long time,” Mauda said, ignoring the question. “We’ve managed to avoid him up until now, and here you are. Maybe that’s a coincidence, and maybe Mother was showing off to impress you—for all her years, sometimes she was the biggest kid of us all. But we’ve been in a stalemate for a long time, and the only thing that’s changed is you. We need to know you’re not a danger, and that you’re not working for Gilger.”

  “I work for myself, one job at a time,” he said. “I didn’t know anything at all about any of you until I got bored and started talking to your Mother Vahn on the cable car.”

  “And now?”

  “And now what?” he asked. He took in their faces, a mix of anger, grief, and . . . hope? “I’m angry about what happened too, but I don’t know any way to help you beyond doing what I already came here to do. I’m not the law, and I’m not a soldier. I’m only one person, and a half-frozen one at that.”

  One of the other women groaned. “He’s useless,” she said. “What good is a hulking, stupid Earther against Gilger and Graf’s fighters anyway? We’re wasting our time.”

  Without turning, Mauda waved one hand. “You can leave, Meg. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

  “Don’t we all,” Meg answered. She opened the hatch in the floor the rest of the way. Whatever was outside the hatch was so bright, Fergus couldn’t make out any details before the woman had climbed down through it and slammed the hatch shut after her.

  It was Mauda who spoke again first. “Mr. Gilger is hard to inconvenience,” she said. “What do you know about him?”

  “A bit of his history and where his territory is. That he’s a scrap merchant operating between here and Crossroads, running salvage with a small crew.” Crossroads Station was another settlement in the same solar system as Cernee, closer to the sun by three gas giants and a lot of rubble. Fergus had been to Crossroads a half-dozen times before, but until this job he’d thought it was one of the farthest things out in what could barely still be called “human space.” Cernee had a more extensive footprint, but Crossroads had the advantage of sitting near an active jump point, which was how Fergus had arrived in the system; passive FTL travel wasn’t tied to specific points in space but was a much slower ride. “Mother Vahn mentioned his second-in-command, Graf, and that he’s in some long-running feud with you.”

  Mauda sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of him. Mari leaned against the wall, one foot resting on the fork.

  “About the salvage, that’s true, but Gilger pulls in stuff that’s hard to believe was acquired legally,” Mauda said. “Rumor is some of it still has bodies inside. He’s got three rocks and a can all to himself just pas
t Humbug, about thirty degrees up the Halo from us. His crew used to be small, but it’s tripled, maybe more, over the last standard. Also, he somehow got his hands on a fancy cruiser that’s faster than anything else around here. He likes to buzz the rockcrappers when he’s bored or drunk.”

  “That cruiser,” Fergus said. “He’s got just the one?”

  “One’s more than enough.”

  “And it’s about forty meters long, rounded nose, jump engine on an underside fin, blue stripe down the side?”

  “That’d be it. You’ve seen it?”

  He weighed what they’d told him and made a decision he hoped he wouldn’t regret. “Not since it was being built,” he said. “But I came here to take it away from him.”

  Mauda leaned forward and put her chin in her hands, staring at him intently. “That, Mr. Ferguson,” she said at last, “would definitely get you your socks back.”

  * * *

  —

  They did return his socks, and his shirt too. Mari—she of the pitchfork—seemed disappointed with that largesse. Still, it was understood that their interests overlapped.

  Mari threw open the hatch. Through it Fergus could see the ends of a narrow ladder snaking down toward . . . nothing? He did a double take, then saw the thin metal catwalk below and stars beyond it. Mauda went first, and he lowered himself down behind her, disoriented as his feet headed toward space and his head emerged last from the solidity of the room above. The other women followed.

  The lichen farm was a large wheel spinning edge-on to Cernee’s distant sun, and from here he could see that it was one of a series. Past them all, the glittering surface of one of the massive sunshields filled the view to their right at a sharp angle; they were just outside its shadow. Makes sense for a farm, he thought.

  Artificial gravity systems were expensive and used a lot of energy. It was easier and much cheaper to use spin to achieve a similar effect, but unlike on a planet, where gravity always pulled you down towards the center, spin pulled you outward. A lot of habs were cylinders with a single layer of living spaces around the outer diameter and a gravity-free open tube running up the center that connected everything. Wheels were similar, although rather than being one fully enclosed structure, they were multiple units connected to a central spindle by hollow spokes, which eliminated the need to heat and cycle air through spaces where the spin was slow enough to make it less useful. Line up a bunch of wheels along the same axis, and you could adjust the rotation of each individually, giving you variable gravity or, as Fergus expected was the advantage here, different light-dark/heat-cool cycles.