Finder

by Suzanne Palmer

  “So what happened?” the Governor said.

  “Gilger is Gilger,” Ili said.

  The Governor strode around Fergus and dropped himself into an empty chair, setting his pistol down on the table. “Gilger has never been stable,” he said.

  “But he’s always been predictable, at least in his goals, and usually unimaginative in their pursuit,” Ili said. “None of his crew would dare step out of line against his orders for fear of Graf. And Graf was under control except when it came to the Vahns.”

  “We noticed that,” Mari said bitterly.

  “Vinsic didn’t know about the cable car attack in advance. He suspected Graf set it up and Gilger either didn’t know or had decided there was now more value than harm in letting him go forward with it. The Luceatans were getting impatient for the talking to end and the glory-seeking to begin. Afterward, Vinsic tried to get Gilger back on track, but then this Earther came along with his ridiculous LARD machine, stole his spaceship, got Graf turned into meatcubes, and just generally complicated everything. Gilger went completely off the rails, and Vinsic couldn’t nudge him back into line for the takedown. Vinsic was not a good man, and he used whatever means he deemed necessary to protect his interests over the years, but in the end he wanted Cernee to survive.”

  “More than that, he wanted you to survive,” Fergus said.

  Was that a blush? Ili shook her head. “I made him promise me that he would make decisions for all of Cernee, to protect it as he wished I’d allow him protect me. He said . . . no, that’s none of your business. As I said, he was not a good man, and he was stubborn and set in his ways and as impervious to reason as they come, but he was a better man in his last days than some men ever manage to be.”

  “And now what?” Bale asked.

  “Now we wait for Gilger to make the next move,” the Governor said. “He certainly will. He has to.”

  “Maybe he’ll just . . . run away?” Mari asked.

  “He can’t, and not just because of the Asiig. Because of you, Mr. Ferguson,” Ili said. “How much do you know about Luceatos?”

  “It’s a Basellan sinner colony, semi-independent; they look for redemption for their sins through death in a righteous cause,” Fergus said.

  “Right. Gilger is Basellan aristo, and class is everything to those people. I don’t know why he’s out here or how he got Graf under this thumb, but Graf brought half of Luceatos with him,” Ili said. The Governor was nodding in agreement. “The Luceatans’ loyalty to Graf, and thus by extension to Gilger, was unbreakable. But with Graf gone, Gilger’s having trouble managing them. They expect glory, and he needs to give it to them to keep them from abandoning or turning on him.”

  “What does that have to do with me?” Fergus asked.

  “Luceatans are deeply superstitious,” the Governor said. “The ones who had been aboard Venetia’s Sword saw both you and Graf taken up by the Asiig and saw you both returned as you were. Since then, word has spread. You terrify the Luceatans, Mr. Ferguson. They want to get away from here so badly it is nearly mutinous. Gilger needs you dead, spectacularly and soon, to reassert his own authority. No one’s been able to find you for a week and a half, and trust me, even with current movement difficulties, people have been hunting you.”

  “We went to go free Arelyn Harcourt,” Fergus said.

  “But we haven’t been able to make contact with Mr. Harcourt to tell him she’s safe because of the comm jamming,” Bale added.

  Gurne spoke up. “Mr. Harcourt sent us to back the Governor because he couldn’t risk being seen fighting Gilger directly. We launched a repeater out past the Halo on the way in case we had to get back in touch in an emergency. If you have a P2P—”

  Ili pointed at one of her men. “You. Show them to the comm center immediately. And make mention that we have a Vahn here, as I imagine someone is worried about her.”

  Bale left with Ili’s man and one of the Governor’s.

  “So . . . what now?” Fergus asked. “When I last saw a map, things looked very bad.”

  “That they are,” the Governor said. “With Gilgerstone and Burnbottle gone and Gilger himself holed up in hiding somewhere planning his next move—and it’ll be soon, I guarantee you—some of the crew he left behind have become desperate. They know that if Authority retakes control, they’re going to get spaced as traitors. Some are digging in where they are, using civilians as shields and hoping to hold onto that territory when all is done. Some are grouping together and trying to coordinate attacks following Gilger’s old strategy. The Blues have mostly turned on them, but some are sticking with the Golds or have abandoned allegiance altogether. In short, it’s a huge fucking mess out there.”

  “I mean . . . what do we do now?” Fergus said.

  “We wait,” Ili answered. “Gilger will be here soon enough. It’s the last place left, and all the arrows are pointing right to us.”

  “Central—” Fergus started to say, but the Governor shook his head.

  “It was about to fall when we set out here to grab Vinsic, thinking he would give us leverage,” he said. “I don’t know whose hands it’s in right now, but it was being overrun by active fighting behind us. I lost good people buying us time to get here.”

  “Central was where Gilger was aiming his arrow, though,” Fergus said. “You could read it in all the maps.”

  “Metaphorical arrow, yes,” Ili said. “I’m speaking of real arrows. Three of them. Black. Triangular. Pointing here because of you.”

  Chills ran up Fergus’s spine, and he felt like all the hairs on the back of his neck were standing straight out. Right, the Asiig, he thought. The solar system’s living compasses that always point due me. “If I leave—”

  “Where would you go?” Ili said. “And do what?”

  Fergus opened his mouth, wanting an answer to fall out, but none did.

  “I thought so,” Ili said. “As much as I wouldn’t be especially opposed to letting Gilger resolve the problem of you, Mr. Ferguson, if I thought it would end this nonsense, it would strengthen his command over the Luceatans immeasurably. He would be unstoppable, at least in the short term. And we don’t have a long one.”

  The Governor sighed, and rubbed at his face. “No, we don’t,” he said. “Time is running out. As soon as Gilger—”

  The lights in the office flickered, then plunged them briefly into darkness. When they came back on, they were dim and unsteady. “What the hell now?” Ili said, pulling her console over. “Some sort of power glitch?”

  The Governor’s wrist comm beeped, and he took his eyes off Ili to read it. “Son of a worm-infested, garbage-trolling—” he started to say.

  “—bile-filled sack of shit!” Ili finished, and the room was utterly silent as they stared at each other.

  “Power problems reported in Central and every other hab we’re still in contact with,” the Governor said. “Someone’s messing with the lines. And the only place you can mess with all of them at once is—”

  “—the sunshields,” Fergus said. “Bloody hell. Has anyone heard from the Shielders lately?”

  “No,” the Governor said. “Not that they were in the habit of talking to anyone, anyway. If Gilger has control of one or more of the sunshields or Suncage, he can kill us all. The sunshields power ninety percent of Cernee. Heat, light, oxygen, food storage, waste processing, defense. A few habs, cut lose, might make it for a while off their own emergency power sources—Medusa is one, Central another, and of course the Wheels—but without power, stabilizers go too, everything starts drifting, and it’s not long before things start crashing into each other. People will panic. Everyone is going to head for the few safe places left, and not everyone is going to fit, and there will be a lot more deaths. And we can’t evacuate Cernee.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because while your alien friends may not have minded you comin
g and going, they’ve picked up everyone else who’s crossed the perimeter set by their circling ship. We’re locked in. We’ve lost.”

  “The power isn’t off yet,” Ili said. “That means he still wants something from us.”

  “Or he wants everyone to know he’s the one killing us before he pulls the plug,” Mari said.

  “Or that,” the Governor agreed drily.

  Ili’s console pinged, and she shifted her attention from glaring at Fergus as if he were personally to blame for everything. “Incoming P2P message, bounced through the emergency repeater on Central. I’m afraid you’ll have to acknowledge it, Governor, as the repeater encrypts everything with Authority keys.”

  The Governor joined her behind the desk, tapped in a long sequence, then laid his hand flat on her palm scanner. Then Ili hit another key, and the large screen on the side wall came to life with a familiar, unwelcome face.

  “I’ve set it to incoming only right now,” Ili said. “Anyone who doesn’t want to be in the picture, stand at the back of the room and shut your mouths. That definitely includes you.” She pointed at Fergus.

  He stepped back into the corner she’d indicated and folded his hands in front of him. Mari joined him, leaning against the wall, her face a mask of pure exhaustion and despair.

  Ili cleared her throat, then tapped once more at her console before leaning back in her chair. The Governor stood behind her. “Arum Gilger,” she said. “So nice of you to call.”

  “I’ll cut to the chase,” Gilger said. “You know I am well positioned to destroy Cernee at will, yes?”

  “Yes,” Ili said. “You have made that evident. Since you haven’t done it, I assume you want something.”

  “I want the Governor, plus Vinsic, Harcourt, and his asshole Martian assassin delivered to me. And then I want your unconditional surrender of all your operations to my people. You have three hours.”

  “Vinsic is no longer among the living.”

  “You lie,” Gilger said.

  “His body is in Attic,” Ili said. “I’d say you could ask your man Parat to verify that, but I expect you’ll find his body—probably with a very surprised expression—not far from Vinsic’s own. You’ll have to find another source for confirmation.”

  “Harcourt isn’t here either,” the Governor added. “Also, we don’t have Harcourt’s assassin in our custody. The man is dangerous and elusive.”

  “That’s not my problem,” Gilger said. “I know he’s there somewhere. Find him and surrender yourselves. I’m leaving the main cable line from Central through Suncage open for you. All three of you better be here—alive or dead—by then, or the price will be higher than you can imagine. But I’ll give you a taste now. Consider it my memorial to Vinsic.”

  Gilger disconnected the line.

  “‘Taste’?” Ili said. “I don’t like that.”

  “Me either,” the Governor said. “I—”

  Alarms blared, saturating the air around them. Everyone in the room put their hands over their ears, wincing, as Ili grabbed for her console. Her lips pursed together in grim disapproval as she shut off the alarm.

  “We just lost Sunshield Six,” she said. “BurntHead’s been obliterated in the explosion. Rock Two, Boxhome, and Cubetown are heavily damaged. The lines that fed that sector are down.”

  “More than two hundred people lived in BurntHead,” the Governor said. He was pale.

  One of Ili’s gray-and-green assistants came into the room. “Ms. Ili! We’re going to have another wave of incoming wounded.” His voice was trembling. “It’s more than we can handle. What should we do?”

  “Don’t waste time on those who can’t be helped. Work your way down from there, do the best you can, and remember that the only number to count is the people we save. It could get a lot worse than this,” she said. “Tell everyone to remember to breathe, while we still can.”

  The assistant left at a half run.

  “I don’t think we have a lot of choices here,” the Governor said. “Gilger will trash Cernee to get what he wants now, or he will later to keep it. Anything that buys our people time also buys them a chance.”

  “As soon as he has Harcourt, he’ll tear apart the Wheels and kill my whole family,” Mari said.

  “I know,” the Governor answered. “I’m open to better ideas, if anyone’s got any.”

  Mari punched Fergus on the shoulder. “You. This is your area of expertise: hopeless situations. Figure out how to get us out of this without any more people dying.”

  The Governor regarded Fergus. “She has a point. I don’t know how you do it, but you’ve bounced from one narrow escape to the next like some sort of hyped-up mutant ballroach. By all logic, you should be dead several times over. So can you find us a way to save Cernee, or what’s left of it?”

  “You have two hours and forty-six minutes,” Ili said. “Closer to an hour and a half, if you subtract the time it’ll take to get to the sunshields from here.”

  “Come on, Fergus,” Mari said. “I trust you. You’ve got to be able to come up with something.”

  Fergus slumped in an empty chair. “Something, probably. Something good? Who the hell knows?” He sighed. “I need water. And I haven’t eaten in close to a day. And I need some time to think.”

  “Time is not something we have a lot of,” the Governor said.

  “Twenty minutes. If I can’t come up with an idea before then, I’m not going to. I also need a tactical map.”

  Ili gestured to one of her men in house grays. “Derrit, see everyone else out and find them something to eat, and then bring Mr. Ferguson some food and water.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Derrit said. “If the rest of you will follow me . . . ?”

  “I’ll stay here,” Mari said.

  “No, you’ll go,” Ili said firmly. “I’d like to have a word with Mr. Ferguson in private.”

  It was a mark of how tired Mari was that she didn’t argue.

  After everyone else had left the room, Ili turned and regarded Fergus again. He resisted squirming under her scalpel-sharp gaze. “Thank you for not killing any of my medics,” she said.

  Uncomfortably, he nodded. “I don’t want to kill anybody.”

  “Yes, I gather all the deaths in your wake have been accidental,” she said.

  “I didn’t start this mess,” Fergus said, stung. “Vinsic did. Out of love, it seems?”

  “And Gilger took him up on it out of hate. What motivates you? Greed? Fear? Don’t answer; I don’t need to know. I see no real chance that any of us will survive long enough for it to matter,” she said. “But tell me: how many people have died because of your plans, because they trusted you? Do you hold yourself accountable for them? Does it weigh on you?”

  “Every single minute of every day,” Fergus answered.

  “Good.” She punched a few keys on the console, and a 3-D map of Cernee resolved itself in the air over her desk. It was nearly all red, now. “Your tactical map. Good luck,” she said, and she left.

  * * *

  —

  Fergus sat in Ili’s chair, the holo-map of Cernee in front of him, and mulled over everything he’d seen and done since stepping onto that cable car to Mezzanine Rock. Derrit brought him water and a small packet of cookies, eyeing him suspiciously but saying nothing. Fifteen minutes later, when Derrit returned to refill the dry pitcher, Fergus cleared his throat. “Could you please tell Ms. Ili that I need to talk to everyone together?”

  Derrit nodded and left.

  A few minutes later, Ili and the Governor returned. “The others are on their way,” Ili said. “We also have an open connection to the Wheel Collective fed up here from the P2P room now, so we can include Mr. Harcourt in our decisions.”

  “Good,” Fergus said. “Do we know exactly where Gilger is?”

  “There are—were—seven sunshi
elds. We expect Gilger has made camp in the central one; it’s the superior strategic position, and Gilger knows we can’t risk damaging it,” the Governor said. “It’s also where the cable line goes, via Suncage, which is how he expects us to deliver ourselves into his hands.”

  As Mari and Bale walked in, Fergus cleared this throat. “All of you know that my plans tend to be ridiculous and go wildly wrong and weird in unanticipated ways, right?”

  “Mari was kind enough to entertain us with the story of your sex toy tennis balls, so I think we have the gist,” Ili said. “Do you have a plan or not?”

  “I do,” Fergus said. “No one is going to like it.”

  “I never expected we would. Tell us what you’ve got.”

  “Is the connection to the Wheels live?”

  Ili sat on the corner of her desk and pushed a button, then swiveled her screen around to face the room. “It is now.”

  Mr. Harcourt was sitting in his chair, fireplace behind him, as he leaned forward toward the screen. “Bale told me about Mars and what you did for my daughter,” he said. “I owe you an apology for my earlier suspicions and a debt I can never repay, Mr. Ferguson. Whatever you need from me, even if it’s my life, is yours for the asking.”

  “I need you to make a stop on your way here without being seen,” Fergus said.

  “I can do that,” Harcourt said.

  “You may not feel so charitable after I tell you what I need,” Fergus said. “And it’ll have to be fast; I don’t get the sense that Gilger has any flexibility in his deadline. I need other things too, but they can probably be found much closer. Ms. Ili, you don’t have any artists on your staff, do you? We need one.”

  “An artist? Probably,” Ili said. “Is that all?”

  “Uh, no.”

  Ili sighed. “Shall we start a list?”

  * * *

  —

  Harcourt was still twenty minutes out from Medusa. Fergus poured the last of the water into his bulb and drank it down, waiting in a silence punctuated by the occasional casualty update. Shadefill had started to tear itself apart from damage sustained by debris and the loose BurntHead cable, and the Governor was on Ili’s console trying to coordinate help evacuating the survivors with the few people he had left who weren’t already tied up elsewhere.