by Alex Wells
He realized with a secondary shock of alarm, quickly suppressed, that she recognized him on some level as well. She followed him as he headed down the street, her gait casual in a very studied way, her thumbs tucked in her pockets.
Best to get this over with, perhaps, and try to craft it into an informative opportunity. He turned into a side street and felt no real surprise as she closed the distance with long strides. He was less pleased with the sensation of a pistol barrel pressed in the vicinity of his left kidney.
“You got a lot of interest in the private conversations of other people,” she said.
Shige raised his hands from his sides enough to show that they were empty, but not enough to make it obvious she had a gun on him. “I’m unarmed.”
“Good to know. Guess you can already tell, but I’m not. You see that little alley over there? Why don’t we go have us a little chat.” She stayed up close to his back – probably to keep the gun hidden from general view.
In the alley, he asked, “May I put my hands down?”
“In a minute.” The one-eyed woman patted through his coat, feeling the pockets and sleeves. It was an impressively thorough search – she even checked under his hat and combed her fingers through his hair. She also found no weapons, because he’d specifically come unarmed. While he’d been given standard operative combat training, and was very good at it, having to resort to violence would be far too likely to destroy his cover. She pulled out his wallet from his pocket, took a look at the IDs inside and the large collection of cash. She read, “Now, I’m gonna guess you ain’t actually Thomas Dunwell, class C miner, not with your pockets this heavy and your pores that clean. So… James Rolland, executive secretary employed by TransRift, Inc.” She said that last sentence with a passable imitation of a central Earth accent, which was curious. She didn’t seem the sort to mingle with the executive staff enough to have picked it up. Maybe she merely had a good ear. The one-eyed woman flipped his wallet closed, pressing the barrel of her revolver a little deeper. “I’ve half a mind to put a hole in your back just for that, ’cept I admit to some curiosity as to why you’re dressed like a mine rat, and so far afield.”
“I would prefer to not have this conversation facing a wall,” Shige said.
“Go ahead and turn around.” The moment he complied, she slammed him against the wall, one arm half across his throat and shoulder, the barrel of her revolver denting in the soft underside of his chin. “So, Mr Rolland, what brings you out to Ludlow this fine day?” She stared at him squarely. Her one eye was too blue to be gray, too gray to be really blue, and moved as she scanned over his face, like she was trying to puzzle something out.
“I was looking for you, actually.”
She laughed. “What, I haven’t pissed enough people off, all I rate is a secretary?”
“I’m not here to kill you.”
“Sure hope not, the way you come armed.”
Shige considered his possible lines of attack. She seemed the straightforward sort. “If you would look in my wallet again, please bring out the bank card and allow me to touch it.” The woman did so, pulling the card with one hand and letting the wallet drop into the dust at their feet while she held the revolver steady with the other. She tucked the bank card into his hand. Shige drew his code symbol over the card, slow enough that it could read his fingerprint at each turn. The card obediently shifted, color flowing over in a wave and turning it to a white ID with the gold Federal Union seal, his picture, and his real name on it. “My real ID, if you would care to check.”
She took the card back with her free hand, squinted at it. “Agent of the Federal Union of Systems… I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means I’m here from the government.” He didn’t find her response surprising. Federal Union presence was still extremely weak on these backwater planets, even the ones that weren’t interdicted by the only source of interstellar travel. The government was still relatively young, after all – there hadn’t been a point to an interstellar government until the advent of interstellar travel, and they were still seeking out the scattered, stray colonies of Earth. Too many records lost, too many splinter groups trying very hard to make certain they’d never be found again.
She laughed again. “Ain’t no government here but the company.”
“You’re right, and it’s been like that far too long. That’s why I’m here. Now, may I please lower my hands?”
She let the revolver drop, spinning it and sliding it back into its holster in one smooth, practiced motion. “Since you asked so pretty.”
Shige lowered his hands slowly. “There have been a lot of… rumors about this world, but nothing we’ve been able to substantiate. I suppose you’re aware that TransRift controls all interstellar routes, and no one else has the necessary technology?” He waited for her grudging nod. “Consider the difficulty of investigating a planet when the company can simply refuse to bring us here, and threaten our contracts if we become too insistent. The Federal Union can only lease from them, ships and navigators both. Too much proprietary technology; no one else has made a successful ship design, or even properly navigated a ship into the rifts without a TransRift navigator.”
“Got you by the balls,” she commented.
“Put simply: yes. I was already in the company’s employ under cover, so I was the ideal choice to come and… take a look around.”
“Huh.” The woman crossed her arms over her chest. “So what do you think?”
“I think this…” Shige indicated the town around them, the mine works, with a sweeping motion of one hand “…violates every labor regulation on the law books. And that is but a start.”
She snorted rudely. “When you gonna get to the point about why I should give a fuck about any of this?”
Shige offered her a thin smile. “Think of me as… the first scout. What I am interested in is why TransRift wants to keep us away from here.”
“If they’re breakin’ your law so much, seems like that answers your question.”
“There’s far more to it than that. I’m curious about the Weathermen now. You have the home office in quite a tizzy even if they have no idea who you are; you’re the first person who has ever come so close to killing one of them. Thus, I wanted to have a chat.”
“So he is still alive.” She finally looked truly taken aback at that. “And how the fuck did you know that?”
“Yes, though he was badly injured. And I know because there was security footage from the laboratory you broke into. We see your face, then evidence of a breakout, and then the former Weatherman insisting on being taken out into the streets immediately to go looking for someone. Less than an hour later, he and his guard are dead, all shot with the same gun.” The linkages between all of those things seemed very clear to him. “You were the foreign factor in the city, the locus of trouble. I find myself very curious as to why you were down in that lab, and how exactly you effected the escape that occurred after you had left.”
Her jaw went tighter with each word. “I may just change my mind about shootin’ ya.”
Shige held up his hands again, giving her a disarming smile. “I want your help and information, not to make an enemy of you.”
“Then back off.”
“We could very well be on the same side here.”
“Sharin’ an enemy isn’t the same thing as sharin’ a side.” The woman took a cigarette out from her case. “But I take your point. You wanna know about the Weathermen. So do I. Shootin’ one in the neck ain’t the same thing as knowin’ about ’em unless you’re interested in the particulars of how they bleed. You know about this witch hunt thing?”
“I was at the ones in Primero and Segundo, yes.” He had an inkling, now, that things were far more than they seemed. One couldn’t be around Mr Green for any length of time without recognizing that. But he wanted to see her reaction.
“Callin’ it witchy is superstitious. But it ain’t superstitious to say some of us ain’t
like the rest.” With great deliberation, she lit the cigarette with a snap of her fingers, letting him see flame play across her hand for a moment. It was a surprise, and he let her see that, but it also fell in line with a few things he’d read recently, and with what he’d seen Mr Green do. “So they’re huntin’ down people like me, usin’ the Weatherman. Why do you think that is?”
He paused, recalling the files he had been able to access. He could see the hunger in her eyes, understand it because it was one he shared. They both wanted information. Offering what he knew would cost him little and set him up as an ally to her, which could be useful. “Information about the Weatherman is far above the classification level I can access. What I can tell you is that TransRift considers people like you to have… gone native. You have been biologically altered by a poorly understood alien contaminant that exists only on this planet.”
She snorted. “Fancy way of telling me what I already know.”
“Ah, but it’s an alteration that the Weatherman you almost killed – his name is Mr Green, by the way – was specifically designed to combat.” The words the document had actually used were consume and control, which he still wasn’t certain how to interpret in the context of what he’d seen Mr Green do already. Though perhaps the control portion had to do with the Weatherman’s supposed ability to keep the technology in Newcastle running properly, which he wasn’t certain he believed.
She stared at him. “Designed. As in–”
“The Weathermen are, as best I’ve been able to find out, beings created by significant alteration in a laboratory.”
“Ain’t that illegal?”
“Evidence that will stand in court is harder to come by than you’d think.”
“Shit,” she breathed. “So I’m fuckin’ contaminated by some – some unknown thing. How?”
He shrugged. “The main theory seems to be that the contaminant is airborne, due to how widespread it is. Everyone is contaminated, but only some of you develop this so-called witchiness. The reason for that seems to be as yet unknown.”
“Hold the fuck up. Everyone?”
“Everyone who doesn’t reside in Newcastle.” Or wasn’t given the inoculation he’d received himself after being given the witch hunt assignment, though he decided to not mention it if the woman didn’t ask. He raised his eyebrows. “Did you think that any of you were actually allowed to leave?”
She rocked back on her heels, face going pale, then shoved him hard against the wall. “You got proof of that?”
He tapped his temple. “Only what’s in here.” It was too risky to physically remove or copy the records yet; maintaining his cover was far more important in the long term.
“How am I supposed to fuckin’ trust that?”
“Do you think I am more or less trustworthy than TransRift?”
She looked like she’d just smelled something bad. “Friendship ain’t built in a day, Rollins. You want my trust, you better act really fuckin’ trustworthy.”
It wouldn’t hurt to let a bit of wry humor show. “I don’t suppose I can appeal to a sense of patriotism?”
She laughed out puffs of smoke. “I like a jokin’ man.”
But he had her on the hook, he could feel it. A little more data to establish trust, and she could be a valuable contact when it came to the long-term goal of ending TransRift’s monopoly. “Let me offer this to you, then. In three days, Mr Green will be in Tercio. Next will be Harmony, then Shimera, then Ludlow. The schedule after is still being set.”
She repeated the names of the towns to herself. “I do appreciate it.”
“I will likely be at these stops.” He regarded her steadily. “So you understand the trust I have placed in you.” He smiled slightly. “And without even knowing your name.”
The woman only gave him a smug smile and touched the brim of her hat. “I’ll remember it.” She turned to go.
“And if I have more information for you, or you for me?” He was just planting the seed, he reminded himself. He’d dealt with paranoid types before, and cultivating those contacts required a careful hand.
She glanced over her shoulder. “Come to any of the second circle mining towns, and tell a crew leader that ain’t in a bluebelly’s pocket you need to get a message to the Ravani. They’ll know how to do it.” Out into the street, she stepped into the flow of people without a backward look.
* * *
Shige nosed around in Ludlow for another day before he took his seat on the afternoon train back to Newcastle. After his earlier stop in Rouse he had a few theories, and Ludlow had seemed a probable place for Magdala Kushtrim to end up, considering the ties between workers in the two towns. He’d memorized her face from her intake picture at the lab, but that would only help him if he personally saw her. Waving about the intake picture or a sketch would be too suspicious; asking after her by name at least gave him the defense of rumor. Everyone was still speaking of the Kushtrims, after all. And nearly everyone seemed certain that Magdala had been killed by TransRift, just as her parents had been. The undercurrent of cold, aching rage with which the workers spoke of the incident indicated much older anger that gathered under the surface and grew like the magma chamber of a volcano, waiting for the rupture of one small fault line to set off an eruption. This he made careful note of, as something that would interest his superiors greatly. That much energy waiting for an outlet made for a powerful potential weapon, one that just needed the smallest of nudges.
He also asked around to find out who this “Ravani” was: the name seemed more a title, belonging to whoever led a group of misfits and blacklistees that operated as mercenaries. More interesting, most people seemed to think the “Ravani” was an old man with one eye – called Old Nick – though a few thought it was a young woman, also with only one eye: Hob. From the description, the latter was obviously the person he had met. The former was another question, and certainly sounded like the perpetrator of the attack at Rouse.
He spent the long, hot train ride sorting the data out in his mind, compartmentalizing everything neatly so he’d be able to recall it as needed, as he’d been trained to do at his mother’s knee. Civil service ran in the blood, after all – well, mostly. Most interesting was Hob Ravani’s show of witchiness, for he thought it was most likely genuine – what good would it do for her to pretend to have such a stigmatized ability? And it meant that there was something far beyond the genetic damage or potential disease implied to be caused by the so-called contamination in the reports he’d read on the sly. What a difference, if the contaminated were in some way powerful, even potentially superhuman. The need to keep their numbers small and controlled rather than waiting for the damaged to die off was obvious from that perspective. There were other company resource worlds, some of which did belong to TransRift, but all the rest had at least a token federal inspector brought in to be wined and dined while well-fed workers were trotted out. Seeing with his own eyes, and what he’d observed during the witch hunt, also made more sense of the absolute quarantine of Tanegawa’s World, when coupled with his growing hypothesis that the entire key to the interstellar travel monopoly resided here. He needed to worm his way further into the corporate hierarchy until he reached a level where there would be more answers than questions.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Bone Collector occupied a confluence of relative perception. Centuries were the blink of an eye to a stone. Species lived and died in the time it took the steady drip of water to wear a surface smooth. Yet to a human, a single day could be an eternity, the passage of seconds like years. He was stone and not-stone. He was human, and very much not-human. He dreamed and didn’t dream. In the human blink of an eye, he saw the stretch of history backwards, the winding paths of probability forward, could walk each to its conclusion.
But now he occupied all points at once and could not think around the sheer clamor of voice and color. Not just one person, one confluence, but an entire planet, tens of thousands of people. The crystals in his bl
ood melted to blue water that carried him down the gravity well of the world and joined a dendritic network of more blue streams.
He floated in a cerulean vein greater than a river and saw himself reflected in it, only it was wrong, it had to be wrong, every mote of dust in him screamed at the sight of the pale face, the black-on-black eyes, the scalp crisscrossed with scars that he felt biting into his own skin. Worse, he heard the discord and mockery of the music that was not music.
He screamed out a note to shatter stone and drove his fists into the reflection, battering it and twisting it until it broke apart. He tried to reform the pieces into something that had harmony, but there discord spun every atom.
He tore at the abomination, becoming increasingly exhausted until he drank in more of the blue flow around him. It filled him with cool energy and gave him the strength to take the broken pieces to their component atoms and let them drift away. The last few glittering hydrogens and oxygens left fingers that began to unweave themselves in a more gentle dissolution. He had taken too much in, diluted himself down too much, he thought muzzily, as he flowed away.
He spread through the reservoirs of rock like blood vessels of the body, down to the thinnest capillaries that almost touched the surface. They were organic nerves of an inorganic lifeform. And then he discorporated completely into the flow, carried through the system again and again to a rhythm he couldn’t comprehend, the massive beat of countercycling vortices in a core that was part liquid and part other.
Molecule by molecule, he caught himself in that fiery heart and listened to it sing, rebuilding his perception until he was close to whole, but the alien, impossible metal of that core flowed into his cracks and bonded him into something slightly different, a new form. He caught himself in that blue, crystalline vortex– one moment cooled and formed into an infinite lattice, the next broken apart with heat and light and sound and vibration – and looked up and up and up.
