Cormorant Run

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “Dawn,” she said, finally. “Eat. Get some rest.”

  “About fucking time,” Senkin murmured, and he and Mako began digging in their packs. Brood began feeding the fire bits of scavenged wood, and Barko approached Eschkov, who was studying the damp-spotted wall with every appearance of rapt attention.

  “Look,” Eschkov said, when the floor groaned a bit under Barko’s feet. “It’s not hexmoss. Maybe a type of lichen?”

  Barko couldn’t help himself. He glanced back at the rifter, who had straightened, her right hand low and heavy.

  She held his gaze while she slipped Morov’s sidearm and a couple clips of ammo into her goddamn hipbag. As if daring him to say something, anything, especially since Brood was right there, tossing a chunk of what might have once been part of a wicker chair into the fire.

  The pale-eyed sardie’s cheeks ballooned as he blew on the flames. Not very necessary, but maybe it made him feel better. Any caveman would be glad of light and heat when the darkness came. The Rift was crammed full of usable technology, but if you had to go through this to get it, was it really worth the goddamn trouble?

  Barko turned away. Laid a hand on Eschkov’s bony shoulder. “Come on, Igor. Let’s get some food. Science needs fuel.”

  After all, he told himself, if Brood was looming over him or Igor, and tapping his fingers like that, he’d want a weapon, too. It wasn’t Barko’s business. What was his business was caring for Morov, and somehow getting Eschkov to eat something.

  Not to mention staying on the rifter’s good side, if she had one.

  36

  DIRECTIVE

  A piece of paper, angrily crumpled but then smoothed, found on General Timor Kopelund’s desk:

  ILAC DIRECTIVE 3708-B (a)

  Following the recommendation of the Anomaly Research Committee, the following has been found and warranted:

  THAT the Anomalies are throughout ILAC territories, and are varying in size;

  THAT the current piecemeal exploration and exploitation of the Anomalies is inefficient;

  THAT standardization of exploration and exploitation is mandatory;

  THAT avoidable casualties and loss of materiel can no longer be allowed.

  Following the recommendation of the Appropriations Committee, the following has been put forward, voted upon, passed, and confirmed:

  THAT the Anomalies under a certain diameter [see 3708-B (a) (1)] shall be explored, processed, and exploited first;

  THAT said exploration, processing, and exploitation shall be under the guidance, control, and sole command of the ILAC ARC;

  THAT unauthorized entry or exit to or from an Anomaly shall be a Class D Felony;

  THAT unauthorized possession or sale of Anomaly Artifacts shall be a Class D Felony;

  THAT all Anomaly Institutes be recertified by ILAC RC;

  THAT all Anomaly Institutes be placed under direct civilian (ILAC RC) control;

  THAT all persons possessing the requisite skills and capacities for Anomaly entry, navigation, and exit (RIFTERS) be licensed under the ILAC RC within the next four (4) years …

  37

  GOT MY REASONS

  The junkyard wasn’t safe, but a cavernous, half-crumpled warehouse with its back to the fence was. Finding a tiny crack and burrowing in like ticks was how you survived when night fell. Not so different from in the city, really.

  Cabra settled herself cross-legged near the small fire ringed with potzegs, its smoke rising in a soft column. Half this building was gone, an amphitheater of decay with a tiny spark deep in its well-throat. Beams and walls were sheared cleanly, as if a smaller Rift had come down inside this one. A little baby Rift, cutting through human structures like a hot wire through congealed fat.

  Sabby lay, his back propped against a concrete pad holding up the wreck of some kind of pre-Event machine. He’d passed out pretty hard, and shivered in his sleep, both from detox and from memory. He’d been raised by Yarkers, and what little he said of his childhood was enough to turn even her stomach. Maybe that was why she put up with all of it. Or maybe because he was so grateful for her there was little chance of him running around after another hole, joy or otherwise. The men who wanted care instead of just-plain-poke were better.

  More manageable.

  Il Muto nodded on the other side of the fire, his pointed, blond-stubbled chin almost touching his chest. Vetch sat with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, a curious pose for a grown man. Cabra wondered if it was uncomfortable, with that belt buckle of his. He’d blown into town just before Ashe’s last run, and had attended her wake. Good rifter, always with something to sell, popping in and out of this bubble like the patrols weren’t even there. Careful, and always had money in his pocket. Crewing with him was generally good, but this time … well, to be fair, she should have twigged when he said come in armed. The only thing you really needed a gun for in the Rift was first-timers.

  Regular rifters weren’t stupid. They’d work something out over the payday, or if they got the drop* it would be evasion instead of a pitched battle, a race to the slugwall. Sardies, though … fucking lundies with guns and tiny little pokers to prop up. Nothing reasonable about them. They were, mostly, what you went into the fucking Rifts to escape.

  So they’d pulled Ashe’s hole out of deepfreeze. The Institute had sent a full team in, and they were working deeper and deeper into the Rift. Then there was Vetch, trailing in the wake, telling them to come armed.

  “You think it’s true?” She stared at the fire, orange and yellow eating scavenged, worm-eaten wood. Sabby exhaled softly, and his twitching eased a bit.

  That was another thing to cautiously like about Vetch. He didn’t pretend not to know what the fuck she was talking about. “Seems someone did.”

  In other words, the bastard running the Institute, enough to send Ashe in. Then pull this other rifter out of a hard freeze a year later. A sardie jackhammer-head wouldn’t do that unless he thought there was a good chance of a return on the investment, now would he.

  “So you thinking to get the drop.”

  “Maybe.” He hunched even further, and Cabra looked up from the fire, studying him closely. Flames reflected in his pupils gleamed, little liquid fires, and his expression was … well, not familiar, but certainly one she’d seen before. A man didn’t look that haggard unless there was something he was aching for, and maybe it was the thing rumored to be in the deep end of QR-715.

  The Cormorant itself.

  But maybe it was something else. So Cabra sucked on her lower lip a little, thinking it over, before she nodded, slowly. “What’s her name? Ashe’s hole?”

  His expression changed fractionally. “Svinga.”

  The satisfaction of having a good guess confirmed was short-lived. “You doing all this for another rifter’s hole? And they call me sentimental.” They didn’t say it very loudly, but she knew plenty who muttered she was dragging Sabby like a thornback dragged black earth behind it. If he wanted to stay in the Tumbledown and drink himself to death, who was she to stop him? What did she see in that junked-up pinchok-mauled wreck, anyway?

  Vetch also didn’t bother to deny the obvious. “Ashe wasn’t too faithful.”

  “Was she?” This was the most interesting conversation she’d had in weeks. There was no shortage of lundie holes—or even other rifters—who would jump at the chance to swing with Vetch, not least because he always had a ready dosh.

  He uncurled enough to select a broken bit of silver-weathered pallet, tossing it on the fire with a small, accurate motion. “Sort of. I ent doing this for her.”

  She bit back the urge to say blur it, you ent.

  He must have seen it, though, because his lips stretched bitterly, twin lines bracketing his mouth. “Why you with the Pooka, huh?”

  Well, one pry with a crowbar deserved another, she guessed. On the other hand, it wasn’t his business, since she hadn’t asked him to come jumping in the Rift after sardies with itchy trigger fingers. She asked her
self that, sometimes, and never came up with the same reason twice. “I got my reasons.”

  Vetch nodded, making a slow not-quite-whistle as his mouth relaxed. “Yeah.”

  That was that. Cabra waited a few more minutes, tipping her head back to look at the half roof. Past the edge, a slice of velvet darkness full of diamond pinpricks and pebbles, clustered in streams and rivers, poured over the Rift. In here, there was no light pollution, except for the moon’s cold, uninterested glare. Boogaloos wouldn’t come into the junkyard, it didn’t feel right. Scuttles might slide through, and it felt unsettled enough that a squeezer or a shimmer might spawn among the stacks of rusting metal and shattered glass. Or something else.

  For right now, though, in this particular little hole, the ticks could doze and digest. Cabra finally settled next to Sabby, scooching her backside against him. He didn’t wake, but his body moved sleepily, his arm threading itself over her waist and his face settling in her beaded hair.

  Maybe that was why she hauled him along. Cabra closed her eyes, and like any soldier who has learned the value of unconsciousness, she dropped quickly into slumber.

  38

  LITTLE GRISHA

  Sergei Sergeyevitch Senkinistov was no coward. With a name like that, he couldn’t have survived school if he was. Toughen up, Sergei the father always snarled, especially at the younger brother Grigory. Fuck the crying. It get you nowhere.

  Grigory couldn’t help it, though. His eyes were on a whole different circuit than the rest of him, and a little etched chip turned on the salt water every fucking time an emotion rose. Happy? He leaked. Sad? He leaked. Angry, hurt, disgusted? Leakage.

  Senkin rubbed at his own hot, grainy eyes. The fire made small merry sounds, and Barko was snoring. Eschkov made little sip-sucking noises in his sleep, his hands twitching every once in a while. The two scientists had managed to dry out a patch of flooring with a heat lamp run off twelve poppers, and they’d played the lamp’s beam over the pile of moldering carpet Captain Morov was propped against, little skittering things fleeing from the heap before the steam killed them all, puffing out for a good five minutes before Barko decided it was dry enough.

  Morov was breathing shallowly as well. The sweat had stopped, and maybe his color was a little better.

  Maybe.

  Hell of a thing. It was always the good ones who got it in the neck.

  Senkin shifted his weight. First watch was his preferred option. Exhaustion could always be pushed off a little longer, and the more tired you got the less you cared what you were lying on when you were finally relieved. Besides, it was time to do some thinking, and he liked to take it slow. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the drawer—his father had kept reminding him, adding thoughtfully but at least you’re better than Grisha—but he could usually figure out which mouthful was the most useful, given enough time to chew.

  Morov had asked, once, why Sergei never went in for promotion, even the automatic long-timer’s stripe. Because I like to know what to shoot at, was Sergei’s phlegmatic reply, and Morov had nodded as if he understood.

  Maybe he even had.

  That was twice he’d thought about Grigory, which usually meant nothing good. Carrying Morov reminded him of dragging his brother’s limp weight through endless spindly-naked birch trees, their branches rattling under the force of a hideous, cold wind. Even semiconscious, his little brother had been sniveling, his nose chapped and cheeks raw from the slow drip.

  Senkin sighed, very softly, and decided on a smoke. His lighter wasn’t as good as Mako’s. It took five tries, here where everything was upside-down and fuckered-up, before he got a steady flame. It could have been the way his hands were shaking.

  Remembering was bad for a man. You couldn’t do anything about the past except drown it in engine degreaser. He was on frontline duty, but not in any pissant warboy spitting contest. Some assholes thought this was an easy job, a federal job with a shiny badge for nothing but sitting around and waiting, cleaning barracks and eating from a canteen a few grades higher than a public co-op’s but nowhere as nice as a corporation’s. All you had to do was watch the slugwall or say yessir-nosir.

  It wasn’t the routine that got to you. It was that damn wall, the curtain of soap-bubble energy, currents sliding through colors there were no names for. You could almost feel the strangeness leaking out, silent-lethal radiation, turning everyone around you into question marks at best and downright motherfucking howlers* at worst. Kopelund was the biggest howler of them all, sending all of them into this deathtrap with only a goggle-eyed felon bitch for a guide.

  The thought that they’d already lasted longer than Ashe the Rat’s final ride wasn’t really comforting. What the fuck had happened in here with the Rat and her crew? Ashe had been a medium-tall, rawboned and snub-nosed, perpetually smiling woman, her nickname coming from her ability to squeeze through tight spaces. Or so someone had said. Someone else whispered it was because she was a stool pigeon for some federal agency, and that was why she never seemed to get busted for any salvage, though she always had cash in her pocket. With rifters, you could never tell.

  You just never knew. Kopelund had to have a sweet deal working with some corporation or another, or he wouldn’t have bestirred himself to send anyone in. The bastard was an old, cautious one, kind of like Sergei senior with his close-set eyes and flint-hard mouth.

  Fuck the crying. It get you nowhere.

  If he was going to think about the past, he might as well get it over with.

  Sergei junior had dragged Grisha home that long-ago night, and as bad luck would have it, their father was drunk and had locked the door. The brothers shiver-slept on the porch, propped against each other, and when morning came Grisha’s face was bone-white, his lips livid blue, and the tears had turned to frost on his cheeks. Sergei had only lost a bit of one ear to frostbite, since Grisha had awakened enough to wrap his own coat around his brother.

  A faint brushing noise broke the memory. Senkin took another deep drag off the cigarette. The old man hadn’t been able to stand the crying boy, but once Grigory was laid in the earth, he became a martyred saint and suddenly, inexplicably, teenage Sergei was to blame. Stole his coat and left him to freeze, Sergei the elder roared, when he got drunk again. You’re no son of mine!

  The sound was … strange. Like a paintbrush—or many paintbrushes—drawn ever so lightly over the outside walls of the buildings. One, ten, or fifty of them would be silent, but thousands and thousands? A soft, persistent susurration you couldn’t get out of your ears once you’d noticed its whisper-clinging presence.

  What the fuck was it? Senkin cocked his head, the neatly rolled cylinder in his right hand sending up a thin trail of nicotine smoke.

  If he was going to think about Grisha, little Grisha who tagged along everywhere and never told his big brother’s secrets, he should also think about the rest of it. It had been easy, really. Just waiting until the big fur-bearded bastard bought straight pine to get drunk on, and slipping antifreeze in. Senkin’s father had been proud of his ability to withstand prodigious amounts of alcohol, and before the blindness struck he’d remarked that pine was starting to taste better than it ever had.

  And after he was blind, it was time for straight methanol. They all thought Sergei senior had drunk himself to death with fatherly sorrow, and little Sergei Sergeyevitch was thought very brave for his stern expression at the graveside.

  Right after that, he’d visited the recruiter, the only way out of that shitty little hole. Basic training was easy after years of dodging his father.

  Senkin hissed a little, shaking his burnt fingers. The cigarette was done, and fell, the glowing coal at its tip winking out before it hit the ground. He still covered it with his boot, just to make sure, and cursed himself for wasting good makhorka. Who knew when he’d get another ration?

  The sound kept going. Brushstrokes, all around. Or tiny wings, fluttering by the millions. It made his skin crawl, so he edged to the window, his rifle us
eless on his back since Brood had all but two clips of the ammo. A lowly guard had to make do with his sidearm, and you bet that fucker Brood had him and Mako doing the watch instead of his own creepy-ass self.

  A silvery glow that could have been moonlight turned every shadow in the driveway into a paper shape with razor-cut edges. The bony lacework of the dry fountain was wrong, and Senkin had to blink rapidly before he realized what he was seeing.

  The shining stuff on the buildings was fluttering. Maybe the sound was coming from that, or from the furred things moving slowly up and down the walls. Their shape was all wrong, joints moving in ways they weren’t supposed to. Cupped paw-hands with starfish fingers gripped the walls, and the creatures’ pale fur cowled sleek dark faces with long doglike snouts. They moved slowly, with terrible grace, and those long noses dipped and browsed as they munched.

  He was cold all over. They were good targets. His hand was at his sidearm even now, fingertips caressing the ends of the etching on the grip. His palms were clammy, and his mouth dry. Either the brushing was louder, or he was sensitized to it now. There was another sound underneath it. A murmuring, like a sleepy little boy. A familiar voice, if he could just listen hard enough.

  They’d spent time bracing the door earlier that evening, but they needed the ventilation from the shattered hole that used to be a window. The rifter just shrugged. Set a watch, she said, and hunkered down next to the fire.

  Senkin tore his gaze away from the light-and-shadow play. The dank cave they were roosting in was even darker, and his pupils expanded. Everyone right where they should be, even Brood asleep. The rifter, curled in a far corner on top of a square of oilcloth, looked unconscious and limp. The pale smear of her face contorted a bit, as if she was dreaming of something unpleasant.