Cormorant Run

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Fuller also claimed he’d survived the Event, and going over the blurline* kept him at the same age he was when it hit. Unlike that tall tale, the non-shit of starving prisoners sounded pretty believable.

  The presences behind the mirror faded. Svin thought about it. The first problem was getting loose of the shackles. After that, there was the guard at the door, and the corridors. If she was running for the slugwall, they might shoot her in the back. Best would be picking up some supplies on the way and escaping notice until she was inside the Rift itself; running in was a good way to get yourself killed.

  You had to watch for your moment, wait for the soap-bubble shimmer that was the Rift’s face to take on a welcoming expression.

  Footsteps. She surfaced again, the fine hairs on her nape rising. Inside the blur she would have frozen to assess the new sound, but out here it was stupid-simple: Whoever had pulled her out of Guan was coming to tell her what they wanted. It could just be information, except anything she had was three years old, give or take. Not worth hauling her ass out of deepfreeze and through several hours of transport.

  When the door opened she could smell him. Big. Meaty. Male. Greasy food but no tang of cigarette, no sourness of metabolized alcohol. So: nondrinker, nonsmoker. Maybe he was into food, fucking, or pain. Everyone had a vice.

  She kept rocking a little, her head swaying as her body kept itself upright by making tiny adjustments. They echoed against the bare walls, though. Either you learned how to sit still in solitary, or you forgot it was even possible. Sometimes you could pretend the tiny noises of your own movement were from other people.

  Once or twice, she’d contemplated making friends with one of the rats that shared her cell. In the end, it was always better to not get attached.

  A flicker of motion. He slapped a red-banded file folder on the dusty tabletop. They didn’t use this room often, there was a hole chewed in the baseboard under the mirror. Rats here, too. The place was probably alive with them. A government installation, running down at the edges.

  “Miss Pajari.” He settled into the other chair, the one that wasn’t bolted down. “What did that transport 70 do to you, huh?”

  She could have said I just don’t like a gun in my back all the time. Or, closer to the truth, I don’t care. They’d broken one of the 70’s arms before they got that she wasn’t resisting. Svin had just lain on the ground until one of them picked her up. No need for anything else. Not like when they’d tried to kill her in the guise of a simple arrest. They’d charged her after the fact with running poppers, for shit’s sake, as if she were fifteen again.

  Still, she’d survived. Svin contented herself with a shrug.

  “I’m Kopelund. This is Site QR-715, and I’m the resident god. I say what goes here, and I got you out of that hellhole. I can put you back in, too.”

  She studied his hands, first. Big, blunt, bitten nails and a few scars white against the darker skin. The edge of a dark-gray uniform sleeve—wool, the dress shirt underneath faintly yellow. The red piping was double. A pen-pusher.

  QR-715. Her heart jumped inside her thin chest, fell back down with a splash. Not just any Rift. The Rift. The fucking Cormorant. The place might look like it was falling apart, but it stood in the middle of some of the most heavily guarded dirt on the planet. Now she knew why the deadzone was thick and daytime patrols had been out without even bothering to conceal themselves.

  The file folder was stamped with her deadname, and it was pretty hefty. They might even know a thing or two. That red band on it said government, too. What flavor of government didn’t matter, it was all the same nowadays. The Event turned the whole planet into a kicked anthill, tiny stupid creatures only cooperating in the face of a larger threat, then falling into petty squabbles right afterward.

  She examined his chest next. Broad but getting soft. Soup stain on the red viscose neckcloth. Uniform was untailored. The badge was shiny, though. Gold, the stamped crest of worldwide authority, lovingly polished. So he was a lifer. Rank stripes on his arm, a high mucky-muck. Probably sneered at rifters, but grabbed whatever he could right out of their hands when they came back from the blur.

  A long, ticking silence. The fluorescent overhead buzzed, dimming and brightening randomly.

  “Did they tear your tongue out in Guan? Ashe never mentioned you being mute.”

  Svin’s head jerked up a little. She studied his big, florid face. Raw slabs of cheek taking up most of the room. Graying hair, clipped close on the sides, the top pushed back and held with some kind of goop. Muddy, indeterminate eyes. You could tell, just from the color of his skin, that he’d never been through the blur. There wasn’t enough snap in his eyes to make her cautious, but not enough dull-cow stupidity to make her condescending, either.

  Her throat was dry. She hadn’t used her voice in a while, so the words sounded like they were being pulled out through a fluxfilter.* “You think she would have?”

  He looked slightly pleased at getting a response. His long nose twitched once, twice. “Maybe. She wanted you here before she went in, but …”

  “Before she went in?” It got easier. Her throat was still dry. No water for thirty hours or so.

  “You want to get out of those shackles? Clean up? Maybe eat something other than prison slop?” Like he was doing her a favor.

  “Just tell me what you want.” Because he did want something. If Ashe was mixed up in it, and it was QR-715, there were only a few things that could mean.

  Motherfuckers. She could just hear Ashe’s voice, a slight drunken sneer, the night before things got wild. Everyone’s after it, but I know where it is. When the Rat got to drinking, sometimes you learned things. If you were lucky, you sometimes didn’t even get a bruise from the lesson.

  The man—Kopelund—shook his big bovine head. “She said you were smart.” Maybe he had a few heavy brains in there to roll around, but Svin doubted he had as many as he liked to think.

  “She didn’t say shit about you.”

  “Well, neither of us can ask her now.” The man tapped his fingers against her file, each one drumming like the fat fucking meatstick it was. “She’s dead.”

  Svin tilted her head back a little. A high-pitched whistling sound, not quite a laugh, slipped between her protruding teeth. Oh, that was just like the bitch. “Blur your fucknozzle.”*

  He must have been used to rifters, because he understood. “I’m serious, Miss Pajari.”

  It’s Svin, you dickwit. But her chin dropped. She let him think she was considering the whole thing, when she’d really made her decision when she’d seen the blurline in the bay. So tantalizingly close. Once she got in …

  “Fine,” she said, the word rasping all the way up from her wasted chest. “You might want to get the shackles off, though. I need to piss.”

  7

  NEVER RIFTING

  Barko ran a soft pink palm over his shaven head. His stomach threatened to growl. “No shit.” He blinked, trying to look excited and surprised. “A full team. How long has it been?” Sit tight and monitor, ILACentral* had said, over and over. What had made them change their minds?

  Or had they? Kopelund wasn’t above plausible deniability. Barko eyed the new kid, who had just arrived, breathless and late, from lunch in the canteen. Looked like he hadn’t just ingested food but also gossip, as usual. Barko couldn’t remember what it was like to get that interested in anything, let alone petty news about people he’d known for years, for God’s sake. Most of the time, he preferred to be left in the dark.

  Aleks’s Adam’s apple bobbed, just like it did every time he got excited. “Kope’s pulling out all the stops.” The kid was a bird, all beak and feather-fluff blond hair. It was almost impossible to get angry at him, but irritation wasn’t out of the question.

  “Christ knows where he got the clearance.” Or if he did. Maybe the canteen had something good today. Why couldn’t the kid just announce what was for lunch and take his place at the screens? “There should have been a
department memo about this.”

  As usual, Aleks missed the point. “Who cares? I tell you, he’s got something big planned. There was a transport today. A prisoner. Some rifter the Rat recommended.”

  “The Rat.” A moment of silence. Barko leaned back against a metal bookshelf stuffed with printouts, wires, bins of strange odds and ends, and dust. It groaned a little under his weight, a familiar, ignored voice. A moment of silence was a nice idea, but in practice, the world always intruded somehow. “I told Kope he needed a full team last time.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s probably going to send you in now. Congratulations.” The kid bounced up on his forefeet, a balloon full of a dizzying lack of proportion married to vast tracts of enthusiasm. His overalls and lab coat never fit him quite right.

  Barko almost shuddered. The skeletons from last time—good scientists, men who deserved more—were deep in Bay 17, where all the stuff you didn’t want to think about was jammed. Even Ashe, strange and nasty as she was, hadn’t deserved that kind of death. “I’ll stay out here, thanks. You go ahead.”

  “Right.” Aleks’s laugh had a jagged edge. His parents had struggled and scrimped to send him to uni, hoping a Rift sciences degree would pave the way for him to get a good corporate position and provide them with a comfortable retirement. Unfortunately, he’d been drafted into an ILAC quota, which meant a stipend and enough nondisclosure forms to choke the profit from any discovery he might make before it began. If he’d been sent to a smaller Rift, he might have been able to sell a few odds and ends on the side. As it was, he was low man on the totem pole here, without the contacts or the clearance to get his hands on anything worth selling.

  No wonder he was such a bouncing basket case most of the time. Right now he showed his strong young crooked front teeth in an excited grin. “If I wanted to commit suicide, I would’ve during undergrad.”

  The older man grimaced slightly. “Don’t say shit like that, kid.” And, by extension: Not so close to a Rift, it’s bad luck.

  The skinny kid hopped from foot to foot. “Is he going to send us in, Bark? Come on, you can tell me.” At first Barko had thought him addicted to something that made him so itchy and fidgety, before he figured out it was just … youth.

  “Tench your springs.”* Barko scratched behind his ear with one blunt finger. “He’ll send in military and someone with research seniority, if he really wants to drag something good out.”

  “You mean Morov and Riggs. And probably Tremaine.” Aleks made a sour face.

  “Go ask them.” Barko turned away from the bookshelf, heading back for the workstations. The computers were new, at least—say what you would of Kope’s methods, at least he knew how to squeeze gear out of the bureaucracy. “I’ll be over here doing some actual work before my lunch.”

  Aleks didn’t bother responding to the sarcasm. He scraped all his fingers through his corngold hair and headed past Barko for the other door. It was a little longer to get to the prime spaces, but he could go down the gallery hall and look at the thick opalescent edge of the Rift, shadows rippling in its depths. The curtain of energy shorted out any measuring device trained on it, and the rifters said it had a mind of its own. It smells fear, Barko, the Rat had said once, grinning her little ferret-smile. That’s why you’re never going in with me.

  He found out he was rubbing his scalp again, polishing with his palm as if that would give him a solution, or get his work done. The kid wasn’t bad, he was just ambitious. And so, so goddamn young. They got excited, being this close to a Rift. The source of all the stories, all the new myths humanity was telling itself. There were books about the Event now, scholarly and otherwise. Some of the early pulp ones were going for a pretty penny on the Bay.* The grainy footage, replayed over and over with hysterical or scholarly voiceovers, was burned into every head. First, the exodus—pets gone missing, the moving backs of rats swimming great rivers, fleeing the cities; the stampedes in wild places. Then, the ringing—who knows why some people reported that high-pitched grumble from the sky? Derided, called cranks, but few of them decided to leave their homes. Just as the apocalyptic fever began, just as other people were beginning to think nothing was happening … the Event.

  There were even pornos about it. Fucking while the world ended had a certain appeal.

  What did not appeal were the casualties. It wasn’t just the first wave—people falling over, blood foaming from mouths and ears, clutching each other the way the doomed at Pompeii must have. Or the second wave, when the shimmer descended and all of a sudden there were blank spots on the world map. Some roughly circular, some jagged, scattered in the equatorial belt but thicker in the temperate regions. None above the temperate zones—whoever had visited didn’t like the cold.

  Barko had long ago decided it was the third wave that bothered him most. His grandmother’s stories were full of the aftermath. Refugees fleeing, the apocalyptoids feeding their kids cyanide, petty warlords looking to make a buck or indulge in murderous dreams tamped down by civilization, hospitals overrun and death that had been easily preventable the day before suddenly inescapable now, dislocation and the disaster as the economy wobbled, toppled, crashed …

  The screens glowed. Sequencing fluctuations from irradiated glaslime was boring, time-consuming, and the type of scientific scut work great discoveries were drowned in. Maybe someone would have a use for the vast mass of data, but since the Calgary Accords, no State-sanctioned rifters had gone in. Since last year, the ones on the payroll at QR-715 had been canned, and the deadzone patrols shot to kill every time even a rabbit moved out in the razed belt. They’d burned a good ten kilometers from the wall with acid flush—the smoke had lingered for weeks—and ripped up most of the train tracks or any other ingress.

  It even made a politician’s sort of sense. Put the resources into the smaller Rifts, try to map and mine them, contain the bigger ones until you knew exactly what you were dealing with. The Wild Era of rifters crawling into any goddamn energy wall they could find was supposedly over. Funding was being reallocated, corporations brought on board, and freelancers discouraged.

  Or at least, that was the plan. The corporations, let alone the freelancers, had their own ideas.

  Which made this interesting. If the expedition Kope was thinking about was sanctioned, it would have to be quiet. If it wasn’t, it would still have to be quiet, and pulling a prisoner out of some deep hole—because the transport officer who had the shit kicked out of her on the tarmac this morning had worn a black pip on her cap, which meant international travel—was bound to make some noise.

  So.

  Barko found he was rubbing his head again and put his hand down, with a grimace. He should be watching the sequencing. It would be just his luck if a deviation spiked while he was busy shooting the shit with Aleks or during his own goddamn daydreaming. His stomach pinched itself and growled, but his appetite was minuscule at best.

  Yeah, Ashe the Rat had told him he reeked of fear and that was poison in a Rift.

  Kopelund had told him, this morning before the prisoner landed, that Barko had seniority, and was going in.

  8

  CAGEY BASTARD

  Midafternoon in the Rabak was a long, slow sleepy time. The two joyholes* on duty—a male-and-female pair of washed-out, rail-thin blonds—had the time to sit at the ancient, wheezing synthesizer and pick out limping tunes between heavy-footed clients. The barkeep, a widebeam piece of meat from Brest, spent his time polishing the bar to a high gloss and either nodding or shaking his head at a trickle of furtive, hurrying types with something to sell. The nod meant they were allowed to penetrate the shadows at the back of the long low room that was the bar proper; the shake either sent them back out the front door into the cold or, if they persisted, filled said shadows with two looming shapes known locally as Bric and Brac. The twin bouncers were part of what made the Rabak a watering hole for the slightly higher grade of corporate wet-whistlers.

  The boy joyhole was attempting a wandering mel
ody that jumped from key to key without warning. The door made its usual squeak-thump, announcing the newcomer was a regular since the squeak was short. You learned to lift the door slightly at just the right time, after a while. A blast of thin white winter sunlight scraped along the much-polished hardwood floor covered by a glittering mat of woven and knotted floxing-cable. Scuffing your soles on it produced a cascade of spitting sparks, and also temporarily shorted out any clipbugs* you might be carrying.

  Zlofter shut the door, the pomade in his black hair glistening, and hurried off the mat. The bartender was already pouring his usual, and as soon as he had the tall glass holding precisely two inches of amber liquid in his hand, the corporate man headed for the right side of the room. Along the wall were the booths, separated from each other by carved wooden screens reinforced with wire netting. The screens, rescued from a pillaged, flaming country estate at the time of the Event, were the Rabak’s major claim to a certain amount of fame and a small amount of class. The really high pay grades watered at the Zamszowe, and of course, the rifters had the Tumbledown. There were other bars—this close to a Rift, drinking was more of a necessity and a vocation than a pleasure—but none of them were quite the thing.

  The Rabak was for ambition.

  He slid into the booth, and the lean, knife-nosed man on the other side barely lifted his dark head. Zlofter settled his ample ass firmly, stuck his own pudgy nose in the tall glass, and inhaled deeply. Satisfied, he took a mouthful and grimaced after he swallowed. His silver earpiece glinted, and his wrist chrono flashed red once before it settled into a reboot.

  The other man didn’t speak, just measured his well-nursed beer with a soft, slitted gaze.

  Finally, Zlofter leaned forward slightly. “I’m glad you could make it.” There was nobody in the booths on either side, but he still half swallowed the words as if afraid of being overheard. Meeting here was a calculated risk—that bastard Kopelund could have a set of eyes in the neighborhood—but it was far better than venturing into the Tumbledown or breaking his usual routine.