by Amber Jayne
Much of the detail of that was lost in the haze of history. People, understandably, didn’t want to dwell on that long-ago calamity.
But there was only so much space in the Safe, only so many places where humans might live. This town had either retained its original population or it had eventually been recolonized, after people adjusted to the new way of things. No doubt the Lux, who had—so the general legend went—seized power in the wake of the Ship’s arrival, had decreed that people must live here despite the hardships.
Reflexively Virge touched her forearm. Under the sleeve of her uniform coat was her sterilization tattoo. She was hardly the only person to be so modified. It was fairly common, in fact.
She glanced sidelong at Tuck Palarch, who had driven her out to this border town at a fast clip. Now he was guiding their car along the side streets, avoiding the people out cavorting in the dark. The place was “riled up”, according to a Guard at a checkpoint. An early curfew might be called.
“This is all that Weapon’s fault,” the sword-wielding Guard had gone on. “Stupid fucking military hotshot.” It had been picked up, like a chorus, by the others at the checkpoint. Everybody voiced a low opinion of the Lux’s military branch, singling out Urna in particular. The consensus was that he was a coward, that he’d run away because he couldn’t take going on another mission into the Unsafe.
Tuck even had contributed. “I never did think much of that silver-haired freak.”
Virge had made no comment.
“Y’know, I never even thought to ask,” Tuck said now. “You’ve never seen the Ship, have you?”
“No.”
The big Guard made a sympathetic noise. “I grew up in its shadow. You won’t believe this, but when I joined the Guard and shipped out for the first time, I kept looking around, looking up. I felt…uncomfortable. I was missing that gruesome monster.” He laughed at himself.
Virge shuddered. Then she took a grip on herself.
The size of the fucking thing was unbelievable! All her life she’d known of the Black Ship. Everyone everywhere knew about the Ship. It was the central defining reality of Elyria. The Black Ship was more important than the Guard, the Lux. The Ship had changed this entire world. And here, for the first time, she was seeing it.
Tuck said now in a reassuring tone, “It’s not as dangerous here as you might think. You’ve probably heard horror stories about Passengers creeping across the border all the time, but it hardly ever happens. Whatever the hell those vile things are, they seem to need to stay immediately under their Ship. My folks used to tell me that the fiends were as afraid of us as we were of them. Don’t know if that’s true. But I do know you’ll be safe. With me. I’ll make sure, Cawd.”
She looked at Tuck again and forced a smile to her lips. It was quite possible that later tonight she would be lying with him. On the drive here he had screwed up his courage and offered her a place to stay. He was a Guard but he didn’t seem to be a monster. She remembered that he’d said he sent part of his pay back here to his parents. That had struck her as a fundamentally decent thing to do. He wasn’t handsome by any reasonable stretch of the word, but he was far from hideous. Besides, looks weren’t everything. Virge enjoyed lovemaking. She liked the intimacy, the escape from reality. It was something no one could take away. Not the Guard, not the Lux. Not even Aphael Chav himself, the evil old fuck.
The thought provoked a soft snicker from her.
Tuck was turning her way, asking, “What’s so—” when his eyes snapped back, and he hit the brakes.
Virge lurched forward in her seat. Before she could ask what was going on, Tuck had killed the car’s headlights, leaving its electric motor droning quietly.
She looked around. They were almost at the gated entrance to a wide black stretch of land, presumably the farm he had mentioned when offering her a place to stay. The surrounding fence was falling apart. She tried to follow Tuck’s intense gaze but she saw nothing. Until she did.
Farther along the property line there were bulky bundles arranged into a number of haphazard towers. Hay, Virge realized as her eyes adjusted to the Shiplit semi-dark. Bales of hay. Something was emerging from among them. A vehicle. Now that she was focused on it, she could actually see wisps of the dried grass spilling off it as it drove through a gap in the fence and swung out onto the street.
On one side of the street ahead lay the farm, on the other was the town. The vehicle—it was big, a commercial rig, with oversized tires—went lumbering toward the town, picking up speed as she watched.
“Cawd,” Tuck said, “you might want to hop out here.” The lights on the car’s controls gave his eyes a steely, threatening gleam. “I’m going after whoever that is. I want to know what the hell those people were doing on my folks’ farm.”
But Virge didn’t want to be left alone on the streets, under the eerie Shiplight, in this strange town. She could still be discovered as someone impersonating a Guard. Tuck was the only person she knew.
“I’ll stay with you,” she said. “Maybe I can help—”
But he’d already set the two-seat vehicle into motion, racing it now. Large knuckles whitened on the steering controls. His blunt face was grim but for the grin that appeared on it. “Now I’m wishing I hadn’t had to leave my gun at the company armory,” he growled.
Virge, wondering just how serious this situation would get, braced herself against the car door as Tuck took the turn, pursuing the rig that had left a little trail of straw behind it.
* * * * *
The two others slated for tonight’s venture into the Unsafe would meet the two parties nearby their respective vehicles. Urna was with Gator, the big Maji man. Arvra was taking Bongo and his maps. Urna wanted to say some kind of farewell to both but Arvra’s manner was brusque, thoroughly professional. They had reviewed the plans for the raid. Now it was time to get going.
They parted outside Gator’s place. People were still out in the street. It was a strange sight. The town’s citizens were milling. The younger ones were playing games, laughing, cheering for no reason Urna could see. It wasn’t quite a festive mood, however. There seemed a dormant violence running beneath these activities, awaiting some kind of stimulus to bring them to life. Or else he was imagining it.
A few steps away from Gator’s door, Urna paused. He felt a kind of twinge in his head. An instinct? An onsetting headache? For one fleeting instant he felt certain he was being watched—looked at deliberately, and with recognition. But there was no evidence of it. None of the passersby were paying him any especial attention. He was still wearing the knit cap Bongo had given him to hide his distinctive hair.
“What’s wrong?” Gator was at his elbow. He spoke in a low tone.
Urna touched his temple. Maybe it was just a headache. Only…he did feel something, and it wasn’t quite a pain. For a moment the street suddenly wavered around him. Then the effect ceased abruptly. He blinked and everything felt steady.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Lead the way.”
They went, moving through the streets. Urna saw few lampposts and realized that even when they were lit, this town was probably a very dim affair. Even so he was intrigued by the liveliness on display. A few blocks from Gator’s house he saw a trio of women and heard the finely harmonized song they were singing. Somewhere in the distance he also heard glass break.
Gator showed no reaction to anything, merely maintained an even, though not hurried, pace.
As they neared the edge of the town, on that side away from the Ship, Urna again wondered about that sense of being watched, that feeling that he had been identified by someone unseen. What would happen if that were the truth? He had a sort of bounty on his head now. The Toplux had promised to withhold electrical power from the whole of the Safe until his presumed accomplices turned him over to the Guard. What if somebody had spotted him? What if they were reporting him right this minute to the local garrison?
He dismissed these thoughts curtly, cleanly, le
aving no mental residue behind. He had been a Weapon. He still had his training, his skills. He could still call on his operational discipline. Never had he allowed fear to impair him on a mission. Never had cowardice affected his performance.
They collected the third person for their party at a corner. She was waiting in a doorway, dressed in black clothes that reminded Urna of his loose, comfortable combat uniform. “Pelkra,” was all the introduction Gator offered. Pelkra gave Urna a tight nod, which he returned. Of her face, he noticed little more than the white thick scar which ran from her ear to the corner of her mouth.
From the corner they made their way across the final street, slipping past a decaying fence, onto the grounds of a farm. The huge bales of hay were there. A little digging was required to get them to the vehicle buried among them. It was a sturdy transport, with large tires that would grip uneven surfaces. The rear hold was quite large. Two hatches opened onto the roof and he and Pelkra took seats beneath these. Gator settled in at the controls.
Pelkra reached under her seat, rummaged, arranging things. When Gator started the engine the faint interior light came on. Urna saw that Pelkra had a bow of dark oily wood and several bundles of arrows gathered at her feet.
The sight jolted him briefly. But what had he expected? He knew these people didn’t have guns. That was part of tonight’s objective—to obtain weapons.
Yet the notion of entering the Unsafe in a ground vehicle, with a bow and arrow as defense against the Passengers…all of it was for a moment nearly beyond comprehension. But he had committed to this. And he would see it through.
Pelkra was looking back at him now. He saw her scar again. Another scarred woman. Had the Guard given her that mark? He looked instead into her eyes, which were large and shimmering and actually quite lovely.
“Good luck,” he said to her.
“And to you.” One of those eyes winked. He grinned.
From the front of the transport Gator said, “Here we go.”
And they eased and shook their way free of the concealing bales, and swung out onto the street.
* * * * *
Bongo, Arvra had learned, was another of these Order of Maji people. It had rather dismayed her when Gator had earlier told her about the—what? The organization? The movement? They were some sort of resistance, plainly, and there were apparently quite a few of them scattered about the Safe. They were organized enough to have sent Bongo here, with a map and a plan to liberate a store of weapons from the Unsafe. The Maji were sufficiently ingenious to have smuggled Urna the Weapon all this way.
But the rest of what Gator had told Arvra—magic, the Farsafe? It sounded crazy to her. Or at least eccentric.
She didn’t puzzle over it much as she and Bongo made their way. The streets were lively. The two of them skulked quietly along, calling no attention to themselves. The lack of streetlights helped. They reached the place where the second of the two salvage vehicles was currently being stored. It was inside a building with a false back on it, a whole wall that could be swung away on hidden hinges. Hervo was waiting for them there. He was one from Frank’s old crew, an aging but still amazingly tough individual. He had eyes like flint and a face nearly as hard and dark. His hair was shaved down to a gray whisper, a cut even more severe than a Guard’s. He had served a sentence of a few months on a work farm after Frank’s operation had been discovered.
“How’s Frank?” he asked when Arvra and Bongo arrived. It was always the same question whenever he saw her.
She answered as she always did. “Frank’s fine.” They both knew otherwise but it had become a ritual, maybe the only way Hervo could express his affection for his erstwhile comrade and his sympathy for Arvra. Frank Finean was in the care of one of his regular tenders tonight. He wouldn’t know that his sister was gone, wouldn’t acknowledge her when she returned.
If she returned. You had to put if to everything when you were going scavenging into the Unsafe.
The transport was a six-wheeled thing, rust on its sides, a converted farm vehicle. It had been given a quicker engine than its original, though looking at the hulking monster you wouldn’t think it could budge faster than a person could jog. Like the other vehicle they were using tonight, it had a sizable cargo hold. Empty, it waited for the goods they meant to collect on this raid.
Guns. Arvra, climbing inside, shook her head minutely. She saw the sense of going to gather these weapons that were supposedly waiting out there for them. If the Lux were ever to be seriously resisted, those resistors would have to be well-armed. Still, it was a different kind of operation than what she was used to.
She settled at the controls, started up the modified motor. Bongo took the adjacent seat. Hervo went to open the false wall. When Arvra had moved the transport out onto the street, Hervo closed up the building and jumped nimbly into the vehicle, taking the rear seat, which was raised and ringed with a set of small windows. The glass had been removed. Hervo took his customized crossbow onto his lap. Arvra knew he was a fine shot with it. He’d slain many a Passenger in the Unsafe with his accurately fired bolts. Frank, in the old days, had bragged to his sister that Hervo ought to have signed up as a Weapon.
That boast rang with irony and sorrow now in her memory.
She guided the rusted but powerful hulk through the empty back streets. They were to rendezvous with Gator at the town’s periphery on the Unsafe-ward side. From there they would set off on their foray. It would likely be a big help, Arvra admitted, to have a navigator sitting next to her, guiding the way. She glanced sidelong at Bongo.
Not a bad-looking guy. Not at all.
On the floor by her feet was a long blade with a handle that she’d wrapped in strips of leather. It was a good weapon, just the right weight. It was a last-ditch implement, however. She would only use it if the Passengers swarmed this vehicle, if they were able to get inside. She was relying on Hervo’s marksmanship with the crossbow. As well as Pelkra and her bow and arrows. Gator’s vehicle would follow this one.
Of course, having Urna, an armed expert Weapon, along on this excursion might just tip the odds of survival and success well in their favor. Arvra nonetheless cautioned herself not to go thinking that the operation was already accomplished. A lot could go wrong in the Unsafe.
As they neared the rendezvous point she saw Gator’s vehicle approaching from a different direction. It too had kept to the less-used streets. No sense in calling the attention of the whole town to this raid.
Arvra let a grim smile press her lips together. Then she saw that Gator’s big-wheeled rig was being pursued.
Next to her Bongo was lifting a hand, pointing. “What’s that?”
Behind, from his elevated seat, Hervo, who had the best vantage, said, “It’s a car, civilian make. But—but there’s two Guard inside it!”
Arvra had been slowing, meaning to make the turn that would take them past the town’s border, off across the belt of wasteland that led toward the truly decayed turf that lay beneath the Black Ship. Now she brought the six-wheeled vehicle to a halt. Gator was still two blocks away. The buildings here housed the few industries the town had. They were uninhabited at this hour.
The pursuing car, Arvra saw, now sharply accelerated. Small and quick, its headlights off, it leaped ahead and was about to overtake Gator’s much larger transport.
That was when Arvra, wide-eyed, saw a hatch open on the rig’s roof. A figure popped up into view. A cap, seized by the wind, flew from its head, and silver hair went spilling. The figure raised a pistol.
* * * * *
Tuck had followed the bigger vehicle at a discreet distance. Without headlights he’d steered, matching the other’s brisk speed. Virge felt his intensity, his concentration on the task he had assigned himself.
Gone was the awkwardly flirtatious male of earlier, the one who blushed so readily. Here at the car’s controls, instead, was a Guard, a trained police official.
They had traveled several blocks. The larger rig was keeping t
o unpopulated streets, moving with a purpose. Virge couldn’t see who occupied the vehicle nor guess their intentions. It wasn’t even clear to her whether they knew they were being followed. Tuck was maintaining a cautious gap.
Virge’s heart was beating fast but she wasn’t panicking. Not at all. In a strange way this was fun, getting swept up in this unexpected adventure. But it could all end badly. She definitely didn’t want to get involved with anything that might turn official. She, after all, wasn’t a Guard.
If it came to that, hopefully she could just excuse herself and slip away from the scene.
“Where do these bastards think they’re—” Tuck was muttering. Then he caught himself, and his shoulders stiffened. “They’re a scav crew! They’re heading into the Unsafe!”
He spoke with absolute certainty and Virge, looking forward, saw that they were indeed moving toward the vast fungal glow that filled the sky ahead. Any sense of high spirits abruptly vanished. This was no longer a venture she wanted anything to do with. Even the vague thoughts of going to bed with Tuck later on disappeared utterly from her mind.
“Hold on!” Tuck yelled, and raced the fleet little two-seater, sending the vehicle hurtling forward. The street blurred past.
Virge braced herself. Plainly Tuck meant to overtake the transport, presumably to cut in front of it in order to stop it. She only hoped the much heavier vehicle didn’t simply plow over them. To his credit, though, Tuck was keeping a sure, masterful control of their car.
They flew toward the rig. Suddenly it was looming. And just as suddenly a hatch came open atop the vehicle. They were near enough that she could actually hear the metal thud when it banged down upon the roof. A figure emerged from the opening. A cap went flying and a great disarray of silvery hair shook out into the streaming wind created by the transport’s speed.
