by Dan Stout
I didn’t have a smart answer. Probably because I knew she was right.
“Paulus is in damage control,” she said. “Weaponized Squib blood? It’s got to end before more people die. Right now the ambassador’s making phone calls. The danger that those canisters pose is being made clear to the brass at the Bunker and in City Hall, without any mention of Harlan himself. Full emergency services will be all over the city.”
“He won’t be in the city,” I said. I remembered Heidelbrecht’s insistence that there was more oil to be found beneath Harlan’s fields. The one most dear to his heart.
“Best guess?” I said. “He’ll be at the original Rediron drill site.”
“Then that’s where you need to go.”
I squeezed my legs, first one then the other, trying to find some relief from their continual ache. A fool’s errand.
“And if he’s holed up with a team of hired guns?” I asked. “How do I bring him in without an army?”
“I don’t know. And neither will you until you go there and find out.”
My cheek settled against the rough metal of the fire escape. Past the safety rails the city buzzed and thrummed. I looked down on all the people.
“I wonder how many of them are worth saving,” I said.
“I didn’t get the impression that you worried about that too often.”
“I don’t,” I said. “But I’m wondering it now.”
“Does it matter? Would it change what you’re going to do?”
“Not really.”
From inside the apartment, I heard another knock on my door. This time it really would be Ajax. I looked at Gellica.
“I’m guessing you’ll want to be leaving,” I said.
“The fewer people who see me the better.” She stood and started to slip out of my overcoat.
“Keep it. I’ll either come for it, or it won’t matter.”
She took a few steps down the fire escape before looking back up at me. “I hope you get through this alive, Carter. I really do.”
“That makes two of us,” I said, then climbed back inside and opened the door for my partner.
Ajax hadn’t gotten more than ten paces into my apartment before a tan and white ball of fuzz streaked toward him from below the dining room table. Rumple jumped onto the back of the couch and nuzzled my partner’s hand.
“He’s always had despicable taste in people,” I said.
“Well, he does live with you.”
Ajax rubbed the sensitive spots behind Rumple’s ears, getting a low purr in return. It occurred to me that the cat had been nowhere to be found during Gellica’s visit.
Jax said, “The raid on that lab turned up—well, I guess you have a pretty good idea of what we found.”
I nodded, noncommittal.
“The whole department’s mobilizing,” he said.
“I kinda had a hunch you’d say that.”
There was a metallic clang from outside, like the spring-loaded latch of a fire-escape ladder popping back into place. Ajax’s head snapped around. Two long strides took him to the large living room window, the one with the broken blinds that I’d been meaning to fix for the last few years. He pulled the blinds back with two fingers and glanced into the street.
“Probably just a ghost,” I said.
He turned away from the window, doing his best to ignore Rumple’s continued weaving in and out of his legs.
“Probably,” he said. He straightened the lampshade that Gellica had tilted for her transformation.
I pointed at the phone in the kitchen. “You oughta call in and request us a snow-runner from the West Garage. I’ve got a feeling we’re headed for the oil fields.”
36
GELLICA MUST HAVE STOOD BY her promise, because we arrived at the Titanshade PD West Garage to find we’d been assigned two snow-runners. A two-seater for me and Jax, and larger transport for the SRT squad. We had a five-person squad as support, and the sergeant in charge was Korintje, a cop well-known for bravery and levelheadedness in tight spots. It had taken some time to get everyone assembled, but by the early morning, we’d gotten the job done. Korintje had sleep in her eyes, and she and her team stifled yawns as we briefed them, but I felt good about going in with an experienced crew.
We were loading up the vehicles with SRT equipment and enough fuel tanks to make it out to the Rediron fields and back, when one of the garage supers came over. He wore an oil-stained blue work shirt with “Roy” sewn in white thread over his left breast.
Ajax and I made our way back to Roy’s small office, and found Korintje already on the phone. She was talking quickly, a creeping note of aggravation driving her voice higher as she spoke.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I got woken up by a call and told to be out here and meet two detectives.”
She saw us come in and her mandibles opened and closed. A clear “help me” sign.
“Hold on, hold on. I’m putting you on speaker.”
She jabbed the hands-free button on the phone and set the receiver down.
“You there, Cap?”
The voice that answered was not happy, and was no longer talking to Sergeant Korintje.
“Carter and Ajax?” Captain Bryyh’s voice boomed over the tinny connection. “What in the Hells are you doing taking one of my best SRT squads out of town? Are you not aware that we’re in the middle of a bioterrorist threat?”
“Cap,” I said. “That’s exactly what we’re trying to—”
“What you’re doing,” she said, “is diverting resources from finding this psycho Heidelbrecht and his insanity gas.”
I winced. Paulus had been effective in sounding the alarm, but her desire to keep Harlan’s name out of things had been too effective.
“Korintje,” Bryyh demanded, “who called you with this crap?”
The sergeant ran a hand over the tortoiseshell-colored plating on her head. “Detective Kravitz.”
“At what point did ‘detective’ start to outrank ‘captain’?” said Bryyh. “Because last I checked, my badge says ‘captain.’ And in addition to lousy hours and an ulcer, having ‘captain’ on my badge means that I get to tell people what to do. And I’m telling you, Sergeant, to not leave that facility.”
Korintje looked to us for help.
Ajax spoke up, talking loud and calm. “Captain, we’ve got good information that the canisters are located at a Rediron drilling facility—”
“Did you just say Rediron?” If it had been possible, I think Bryyh would have crawled through the phone lines and strangled us. “Carter, did he say Rediron? No, he can’t have said Rediron, because I told the two of you to leave the Harlan Cedrow angle alone.” She was talking fast, leaving no way to get a word in during her rant. “I have a densely populated city that I need to protect. We are going to secure the safety of our people first, and worry about the ice plains after that.”
I scooped up the phone, making my appeal directly into Bryyh’s ear.
“I get that. Honestly, I do. But, Cap, I know where the canisters are, I know who has them. Let me go out there and end this.” I may have overstated my level of certainty, but something I said must have clicked with Bryyh, because she let me keep talking.
“You wanted me on this case for a reason. You trust me, or at least you did.” I didn’t review all the reasons I’d given her lately to withdraw that trust. “Let us do this. If we get there and get in trouble, we’ll radio back. But everything in me says that this is the right play.”
There was a crackling silence while I could hear deep, angry breathing. Then she told me to put her back on speaker.
“Alright,” she said. “Carter and Ajax can go on their hunting expedition. Korintje, I need you down in the city. Can you spare one body to go with them? It’s your call, Sergeant.”
Korintje hesitated.
Tactical teams rely on cohesiveness to be effective. She was being asked to give up a lot. After a long moment, she shook her head.
“I can’t break off just one person,” she said. “It’s got to be all or nothing.”
And just like that the strike team evaporated. It seemed we were back to my usual streak of bad luck.
When Bryyh disconnected, Korintje stood and let out a low, whistling note of apology. “Sorry,” she said. “Maybe you can find another crew to break loose?”
“Will we do?” The voice came from the door to the small office. There, leaning in the doorway and grinning like fools, were Myris and Hemingway.
Ajax stood. “I made some calls,” he said to me. “In case anyone else wanted to tag along.”
I managed to not embarrass myself by jumping for joy.
“I think we can make that work,” I said.
* * *
Once we got the snow-runner—we only needed one, now—we headed northwest, onto the ice plains. At first I briefed the others, telling them what they needed to know about the canisters and my fears about Harlan’s plans. Even so, I didn’t tell them about Gellica’s transformations. Maybe I thought they wouldn’t believe me. Or maybe some things are too private, even for fellow cops.
We drove for hours, until the buildings of Titanshade receded and only the dark, jagged shape of the Mount remained on the horizon. Away from the city the stars were bright, and the blue and white swirls of the crescent moon were visible until the late morning sun broke the horizon and chased it away. We watched the sky and fell into the uneasy silence that sooner or later overtakes every long drive.
Eventually Myris and Hemingway were snoring in stereo from the backseat. Ajax drove while I did my best to relax and let my body rest. I ran the radio tuner up and down the dial, searching for something worth listening too.
I’d finally managed to get WYOT to come in when Ajax asked, “You really think Harlan Cedrow’s holed up here?”
The sunlight reflected off the ice fields as they whipped past, bright even through the heavy tint of my sunglasses. The cold out on the ice plains was a death sentence, and the white/blue glare of the ice an absolute. With no glasses a wanderer on foot would be almost blind, every bit as doomed as someone without proper clothing.
“Yes,” I said, before walking it back. “I think so.” I looked at him. “We’ll find out.”
“And there’s no chance Paulus is just playing us?”
Ajax kept his eyes on the road. His sunglasses didn’t perch properly on his head, a common problem for tiny Mollenkampi ears. To make them fit he’d looped a couple rubber bands between the ear hooks on the glasses, creating an elastic band to keep them in place. He had bent over backward in so many ways since being assigned to babysit me.
“Pretty sure,” I said. “When she had me planted face first in the carpet she asked if Heidelbrecht had killed Haberdine. That may have been a play, but I don’t think so.” It wasn’t exactly definitive, but it was the best I could do. A little bit of deduction and prayer that I wasn’t about to get us all killed on some wild goose chase.
I spun the tuner again, passing a couple of decent songs to settle on a disco station. Ajax glanced my way in surprise, but I settled back in my seat, content to let the drum machines and synthetic strings wash over me. Jax smiled, and tapped the wheel in time to the beat. The signal grew weaker as we drove, but we let that station play until it dissolved into the hiss and snarl of radio static.
We passed fabricated structures pockmarking the sides of the road like blisters erupting from the skin of a fever patient. We passed ancient pull rigs, designed to be attached to the backs of trucks, brought out on the ice decades ago by fools trying to strike it rich. They were all frozen in place now. The owners had abandoned them or walked off and froze. It wasn’t unusual to find corpses from time to time, frozen solid and exposed by a shift in the winds. A solid blow with an ice ax could shatter those bodies just as thoroughly as their long-dead dreams of wealth.
Finally we came closer to the Rediron holdings. Pump jacks moved in the distance, giant hammers swinging against the snow-covered earth, forcing an ever-lessening stream of petroleum out of the earth and into Harlan’s coffers. To the west a series of drill derricks stood tall, continuing their search for the oil that Heidelbrecht had promised was there.
We rumbled past in the snow-runner, Myris and Hemingway, Ajax and me. Team Carter all accounted for. We kept driving, not slowing to investigate the newer rigs or stopping to reconsider the wisdom of our quest, until we reached the oldest of the Rediron sites, where generations ago the first transformation of Titanshade had begun.
When we arrived at the compound there was no guard at the gate, but we slowed anyway. The security shack was mostly a formality, as were the roads themselves. A snow-runner could go where it pleased, plowing its way through the loose snow on top of the ice plains. Of course, the driver would have to rely on blind luck that he or she wouldn’t encounter any ice-covered crevices, crusty surface giving way as soon as the snow-runner’s weight touched it. The real protection out on the ice plains didn’t lie with fences and guards, but the naked hostility of the environment itself.
The guard shack here was empty, but orderly. Someone had left their post, but had taken the time to close up properly, even putting a “back soon” sign in the window, a false clock face with blue plastic hands that indicated the guard should have returned hours ago.
The snap of Hemingway’s gum broke the silence.
“Does this shack tell us anything we didn’t know before?” she said.
“No.” Ajax squeezed the steering wheel. “Not really.”
“Then let’s not sit here staring at it,” she said.
We drove on, deeper into the rig camp. The buildings got smaller, the ice thicker on their roofs. The lack of ice on some of the buildings and machinery meant that someone had fired up the thermal wiring. This place wasn’t merely a museum piece, it was a functioning drill site.
The service road led to a parking lot, a rough structure to give shelter to any vehicles parked temporarily. Anything staying at the compound for more than a day would be stored inside a heated garage bay. The short-term lot stood empty except for our snow-runner and one other vehicle, an oversized luxury runner that required an ostentatious display of wealth simply to rev the engine. It had oil money written all over its custom interior.
Ajax parked our runner, and the four of us peered at our surroundings. Cops rarely came out this far, and our reception was uncertain. The rigs were far past the boundaries of the city and the jurisdiction of our badges. Anything short of a murder would be dealt with by the crews themselves. And even the homicides we knew of were just that—the ones we knew of.
The compound was made up of a dozen one-story structures, an old-time drilling well to be run by a handful of workers rather than a modern rig that could house a hundred. The buildings were squat things with corrugated steel walls and steep-pitched roofs that had survived decades out in the ice plains. But what was shocking was how well-used it all was. Rediron was still operating this site, as old and as certainly tapped out as it was. If I’d had any doubts about what the mad doctor Heidelbrecht had told me, they evaporated like morning mist. Harlan was searching for the oil that would preserve the city as he knew it.
We were there to stop him.
37
I TURNED IN MY SEAT. Both Myris and Hemingway were peering out the windows as they struggled into their heavy outer coats. Bulky things that constrained movement, there was no surviving on the ice plains without them. Once her coat was on, Myris checked her thick over-mittens. Their pleated fabric had a center flap that allowed gloved fingers to emerge and access her weapon, a compact 9mm submachine gun. Best used in close quarters, it was the standard meat and potatoes of SRT squads. The weapon was on loan from Korintje, who’d said it was the least she could do.<
br />
I pointed at it. “You got a light for that thing?”
She looked at me and adjusted her thick sunglasses. In the rig compound there were enough dark shapes that the ice glare was reduced, but for the next hour or so the horizon would still be painful to look at.
“Some of those buildings will be powered and heated, others will be cold storage. And dark,” I said. “You’ll want a light as we go in and out of them.”
“Fair enough.” Myris reached up to her vest and pulled out a flashlight. She clipped it to the handrail on her weapon, where it secured with a snap. Whatever she pointed at would be illuminated. Eyes crinkling, she said, “The sergeant sent me out with all the accessories.”
Ajax fiddled with the CB, but couldn’t raise a signal. He read out our position and intent anyway, half following protocol, half as a prayer.
Hemingway snapped her gum. “So are we going in?”
Ajax answered. “Always scope out the perimeter,” he said. “Get your establishing shot. You can learn a lot at a distance. Or so I’ve been told.”
“Keep your hand on your weapons, but keep them out of sight,” I said. Our heavy thermal jackets were identical, and it was easy enough to drape a fold of material over our arms. “No need to alarm anyone until they make a play.”
We left the runner, and made our way to the garage next to the parking lot. A sturdy structure with bay doors large enough to allow large drilling trucks to enter, it was deserted, though heated and lit. A half-full thermos of coffee sat on a workbench.
We reentered the cold and moved toward the next set of buildings. It was a long, silent walk, marked only by the crunch of snow underfoot. We moved slow and steady, eyes roving, ready to respond to any kind of activity, friendly or otherwise.
The next building was tool storage. Poorly lit and with limited heat, it consisted of two rooms of organized materials, and a repair station.
That’s where we found the first body.
