I thought about calling him a mindless drone and a freak, but I held my tongue. “Affirmative, and I’d love to see that report when we’re done here, too.”
“You are not authorized.”
“All your skills and you still can’t sense sarcasm.” I sighed and shook my head. “You take the east side. I’ll take the west.”
“Agreed. If you do locate the Ringer first, do not engage him without contacting me.”
“Will do.”
I pointed at my hand-terminal with an exaggerated motion before walking cautiously out onto the river. Every subsequent step helped me to gain a little more confidence in the safety of the ice.
“What did I do to deserve this?” I grumbled under my breath once Zhaff was out of earshot.
I readjusted my duster so that I could breathe into the inside of my collar and avoid the frigid air. Then I reached down to my belt, grabbed my spotter goggles, and set them to thermal imaging. When I pulled them down over my eyes I saw nothing but darkness.
—
Hours passed. It was rare on Earth that the sky was clear enough to see the sun as anything but a dull glow. It wasn’t at that moment, but I could tell it would be setting soon. My legs were getting sore, and my cheeks felt like they were ready to crack open from the cold. It’d been more than two hours since Zhaff and I split up and I’d neither heard back from him nor found the Ringer myself.
So much rubble and ice invaded the streets of the decrepit settlement that it was hard to move quickly. Like many bodies of water after the Meteorite hit, the river had apparently flooded and was frozen soon after. The ice devastated everything it touched as it expanded. There were treasure hunters who dedicated their lives to digging through their ice to find artifacts from the old world, but mostly all they discovered were the rusty chassis of ancient vehicles. I could see pieces of some popping up here and there like tiny islands of metal. It was as if every pre-Meteorite human had one of their own.
It was hard to use landmarks to track my path when so much looked the same. Signs at intersections were completely tarnished and unreadable as well, so when I was forced to cut through gutted buildings it was impossible to know if I was going in circles without constantly double-checking the regional scans on my hand-terminal.
I climbed up the half-collapsed stairs of what looked like an apartment building and looked out through a cavernous hole in the wall of the second floor. There was nothing out there but more rubble. I rubbed my hands together to regain some warmth before continuing on. Even with my gloves on, my fingers were numb. I decided I’d give it ten minutes more before I gave in and allowed Zhaff to call in the airships.
I shimmied out through the hole and searched for a way to get a little higher on the building since the stairs inside were nowhere to be found. A sagging balcony jutted out from the building one story up. A piece of wall snapped off when I tried to place my foot on it to climb up, but I was able to use what little feeling I had left in my fingers to heave myself onto it. Once there, I lowered my spotters over my eyes listlessly, expecting to see nothing but darkness for the hundredth time. I swept my gaze from side to side, and again saw nothing, but right before I removed them I noticed the tiny red blip of a heat signature on the edge of my vision.
I would’ve grinned if my face weren’t so numb. I clambered down from my perch as fast as I could without killing myself. When I reached the streets I whipped out my pulse-pistol and headed in the direction of the thermal signature.
Once I got closer I began monitoring my steps, making sure they were light enough not to crunch the layer of ice that seemed to be everywhere. I arrived at a break in a cluster of buildings. A small, broken-down shack sat at the bank of a narrow tributary stemming from the nearby river. It had no roof anymore, and most of its stone walls had crumbled away to reveal a bare interior. Beyond it, barren land extended through a haze until a faded range of mountains in the distance sliced up through the thick veil of clouds.
I crouched behind a wall overlooking the shack and checked my spotters again. The heat signature was somewhere on the other side of it. I lifted my hand-terminal to my mouth and set it to contact Zhaff.
“I think I’ve located the Ringer,” I whispered boastfully. Finding him may have been a stroke of luck, but for all of Zhaff’s supposedly extraordinary abilities, to me there was no substitute for real experience. I wanted to make sure my partner was aware of that.
Zhaff’s response came immediately. “It will be easier to capture him alive if there are two of us. I will be able to reach your position in precisely eight minutes and seventeen seconds.” He didn’t even need to pause in order to calculate the number.
“Fine, but if he starts moving I won’t be able to wait. He’ll spot me following.”
I ended the call before I could receive a reply. Then I peered at the ruined structure again, this time without my spotters on, and tried to locate the Ringer with my own eyes through the cracks. I couldn’t.
I breathed out slowly and turned my attention to my pulse-pistol, analyzing it to make sure everything was in working order. That went on for about a minute before I elected to ignore Zhaff’s warning. I could take him down alone. It was only a weak Ringer, after all. I didn’t need a partner. Plus, remaining still was making me shiver even more than I had been.
I readied my gun and approached the shack with furtive steps. I wanted to keep the element of surprise on my side just in case the Ringer had managed to snag a few extra bullets back at the hauler shop.
“Don’t move, Ringer!” I shouted once I poked around the corner of the shack with my pulse-pistol aimed. “Or I’ll blow a hole in you so large you’ll freeze from the inside out.”
The Ringer was sitting out in front of the shack, against a pile of stones that looked like they used to belong to one of its walls. His head turned toward me, but unlike most of the targets I’d ever tracked down, he didn’t ignore the warning and attempt to run. He barely even moved. In fact, the worry seemed to drain from his face once he realized who the man barking at him was, and he returned to gazing out toward the faraway mountains.
The first thing I noticed about him was that he wasn’t wearing his mask or gloves. They were lying on the ground next to him beside the empty old-world revolver. The next thing was that he was dressed in nothing but a thin boiler suit. The sleeves were shorter than Zhaff’s and revealed stringy arms so white that they glowed under the waning sunlight as well as a deep gash on his left biceps, the blood around it frozen. He didn’t appear cold in the slightest. I was struggling to keep my teeth from chattering as I spoke, yet the Ringer didn’t even have goosebumps.
“By Trass, I knew someone would track me down eventually, but that was faster than I expected,” the Ringer said calmly before succumbing to a fit of coughing. His sickly eyes were even redder than when I met him, like two almond-shaped rubies. Every time he exhaled it sounded like a broken-down air recycler. If the g-pill I saw him take back at the Molten Crater was the last he had, his lungs were probably verging on collapse from enduring Earth’s gravity. “Impressive for a mud stomper,” he continued after he gathered his breath. “Shame it had to be you, though.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said as I advanced on him. “There are some of us who only prefer one aspect of alive or dead, no matter what the reward is. Especially for offworlders who blow up innocents. Lucky for you I’m just trying to make a living.”
“None of you are innocent,” he stated categorically, retaining his calm façade despite the harshness of his words. “So what now, Collector?”
I was surprised the Ringer made no effort to deny his part in the bombing. Fugitives were rarely so compliant. Because of that it took longer than intended for me to come up with a response. When I finally did, I decided to lie. “It’s up to you,” I said. “Pervenio airships are already on their way to retrieve us.”
“So it’s that simple here on Earth? Offer a man chains and expect him to lock them on himself before following quie
tly?”
“Again, it’s up to you.” I kept my gun aimed steady as I moved around behind him until I was close enough to reach out and touch him. “Make this easy on me and I’ll call them off. We’ll take the train back instead; just us. Unless you’d rather start the interrogation right away. Trust me, the people who want you won’t be as cordial as I am after what you did.”
“Not so pleasant when foreigners come and murder your people, is it?” the Ringer asked scathingly, his mask of composure finally beginning to slip away. The same rage I’d seen brewing in his sickly eyes back in New London returned in full force.
“You offworlders and your messages. If your flair for dramatics didn’t keep me employed, I might find it irritating.” I pressed the barrel of my pistol against the back of the Ringer’s tall head. “Now c’mon, get up. Don’t make this harder on yourself.”
“As you wish.”
The Ringer rose. I went to grab his wrists with my off hand so I could cuff them with a band of collector-issued fiber-wire, but as I did he whipped around with catlike fluidity. The pistol was snatched out of my grip, and before I even knew what had happened I was staring down its barrel at a loaded chamber.
The Ringer was panting from exerting himself on Earth, but somehow he still managed to hold the firearm perfectly steady. His gloveless hand wasn’t shivering even the tiniest bit from the bite in the air or the wound on his arm. “I can feel your fear, Collector,” he said, his gravelly voice sounding suddenly empowered.
I was stunned. Maybe I was just getting old, or my grip was weakened by the cold, but all I could think about was how I’d never seen an offworlder move so swiftly under Earth g conditions. The man had clearly been proficiently trained.
“You don’t want to do this,” I stammered, trying to remain as poised as possible in the face of death. My survival instincts kicked in. Words came pouring out of my mouth. “My partner will be here any minute. And if you escape him, too, then the other collectors won’t stop coming after you. How long do you think you can hide out here before you die of whatever sicknesses ail you? Not long enough to starve, I’d wager.”
“I’m not hiding,” the Ringer declared.
I racked my mind to come up with anything that might buy me a few more moments. Zhaff had to be close, as much as it stung my pride to know he’d been right that I should’ve waited. “Most others won’t hesitate to shoot you down on sight simply to save themselves the hassle. I’ll tell my superiors you cooperated, Ringer. I’ll make sure they treat you fairly. Get you the medicine you need.”
“And what of the rest of my people?” the Ringer snapped. “When I left Titan my wife was withering away to bones in one of Titan’s quarantines. My son must live in fear of that place every day! Of being infected by your kind!”
Projecting his voice so loudly caused him to begin coughing again, this time even more violently. When it was over with and he removed his hand from his mouth, I noticed a bloodstain on his pale flesh. I tried not to let it show, but I could feel my usually steady heartbeat hasten further as I realized I was standing in the sights of a man with nothing to lose.
“I can look into getting her treatment if you comply,” I said. “I give you my word, Ringer…Titanborn.” I remembered from our first meeting that he preferred that term over the more widely used Ringer.
“You can’t promise me that,” the Ringer said. By then he’d noticed the blood on his hand as well. His gaze lingered on it for a second before he looked toward the sky. He breathed in deeply, thoroughly enjoying the chill that came with it. “It’s so like Titan out here, minus the ruins. Beautiful. You mud stompers are so consumed with leaving that you don’t even realize what you have.”
Knowing I wasn’t going to be able to talk my way out of this, I waited for an opening to appear so I could try to get my pistol back. Somehow, even as he reminisced, the Ringer’s aim didn’t waver.
“I’ll never see my son grow into a man, or feel the soft touch of my wife’s lips again,” he said. “Never see the silhouette of the Ring beyond the shroud…” A single tear rolled out from his eye, freezing halfway down his cheek. He then stared me straight in the face. “Don’t you see, Earther? I’ve been dying ever since I came to this world, and I won’t suffer it any way but free.”
The Ringer appeared more tranquil than angry. His finger grew even more comfortable around the pistol’s trigger. I swallowed hard, getting ready to pounce and make my last stand, when suddenly someone shouted.
“Drop the weapon, fugitive!”
Our heads snapped toward the origin of the voice. Zhaff’s silhouette appeared standing between a pair of tall ruins, the yellow lens over his eye glinting. He was lining up a shot.
When I turned back to the Ringer his lips lifted into a frail smile. “I’ll have to take you up on that drink some other time,” he whispered. “From ice to ashes.”
I realized what was about to happen and lunged out, but for the second time in too short a period I was too slow. The Ringer turned the pistol around on himself and squeezed the trigger. The forsaken city at our backs caused the gunshot to echo as if artillery had fired. His body collapsed in a bloody heap at my feet.
Chapter 9
A breeze whisked away the smoke hanging in the air from where the Ringer had fired my pistol. I fell to the ground and reached for his throat to check for a pulse out of reflex. I knew there was no way to survive a pulse-pistol round to the head from such close range. A gruesome, fist-sized hole was blown through the side of his skull, and his ghastly eyes stared toward the murky sky without blinking.
Zhaff was beside me in what seemed like an instant; his grim, emotionless façade aimed in my direction. “I told you to wait,” he said, his always-flinty voice bearing only the slightest indication of the irritation his words conveyed.
I got to my feet, straightened my duster, and mustered the brazenness of a veteran collector. “He spotted me first,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice. I had him right where I wanted before you showed up and spooked him.”
Zhaff’s eye-lens zoomed in on my face. He was so close that I could see all of its components and apertures working tirelessly behind the glossy yellow surface. “You’re lying,” he stated.
“What about you? You had the shot while he was still aiming at me. If we’re going to be partners, you damn well better take it next time!”
“He was preferred alive.” Zhaff pointed to a fresh bullet hole etched in the frozen dirt only a meter away. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. “He turned the pistol on himself precisely as I fired a disarming shot at his hand.”
I looked back to the spot where I’d seen Zhaff aiming from. It was fifty meters away at least. “That’s a long way to be shooting at such a small target with my life on the line.”
“I would not have missed,” Zhaff responded with unnerving certainty. “He is worth little to Pervenio dead.”
“We get paid either way, dammit!” Saying those words out loud helped me remember that the Ringer was worth less to me dead as well.
I clenched my jaw. I knew I’d messed up. I wouldn’t have survived so long as a collector if I couldn’t recognize that. And I knew Zhaff could read it all over my face, but I wasn’t going to give the Cogent the satisfaction of hearing it. Missing out on double the credits by a fraction of a second had me irked enough as it was. Coming up short on another mission made me sick to my stomach.
I bent down next to the body and got to work prying its cold, locked fingers off my pistol’s grip. When I finally got it free and lifted it, the sky was already so dark that it was hard to tell how bloody it was. I scraped the barrel against the rigid ground to clean it off as best as I could.
“What did you say to him to make him shoot himself?” Zhaff asked, breaking the silence.
I glanced up at him. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny or not, if he was even capable of that. “What did I say to him?” I said. “Trust me, this is the first time I’ve ever seen this. I’ve hu
nted men and women from every background you can imagine. New immigrants, old immigrants, rich and poor. Hell, I’ve even tracked down some crazed preachers of the Three Messiahs. I’ve seen them look into the end of this gun and be ready to abandon everything they ever believed in just for a few more hopeless breaths. Given the same chance as this Ringer, none of them would’ve spared my life, let alone pulled the trigger on themselves.”
“It is likely he had information about the bombing and didn’t want to risk interrogation.”
“And let me guess. You would’ve gotten it out of him if we captured him alive?” I tried futilely not to allow my irritation to infiltrate my tone.
“It is a distinct possibility. I have had extensive training in extracting information—”
I cut him off. “Trust me, any man willing to do that wasn’t going to get anything pried out of him. Not even by you. It’s archaic, suicide. You’d think after a meteorite almost wiped us all out that a man wouldn’t be so quick to take his own life.” The sentiments of the USF were spewing right out of my mouth before I was able to contain them.
“His people did not experience the Meteorite.”
My brow furrowed. There was nothing I could say in response to that bit of truth. Still, as I stared down at the body again I couldn’t help but wonder what it’d be like to be willing to die for something real, something more than credits. I could picture the Ringer’s face right before the shot went off in my mind. He didn’t hesitate at all. Pure conviction, and for what I’m not sure. It didn’t make any sense to me.
“I have already contacted Pervenio airships,” Zhaff said. “They will be here as soon as possible.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell them this couldn’t be avoided?” I asked, suddenly not feeling very much like I was in control. Once the directors found out about how I botched the capture of a potential lead I’d no doubt be sent back on mandatory vacation, or worse. Forced retirement seemed just as likely a scenario.
Zhaff didn’t answer. I watched him kneel down to further evaluate the corpse. He lifted the Ringer’s head and looked through the gaping wound in the side of it. Even while doing something so undignified, each of his motions was executed with unbelievable deftness. It was as if he’d done it a hundred times he was so robotic, even though I knew he was only recently out of training.
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