by Alex Wells
Mag nodded, like she could hear what Hob had been thinking. Maybe she could. That was another thing Hob had never quite had the guts to ask about. “Finish your lemonade.”
Chapter Five
70 Days
“Welcome, Mr Rolland. I assume you’re here to check on the progress of the newly assigned Weatherman?” The woman, whose ID proclaimed her to be Dr Ekwensi, had deep black skin, was of medium height and heavyset, with hooded eyes not quite perfect enough to be the result of body modification. She also had her salt-and-pepper curls cut so close to her head that in the harsh light her scalp shone through. Not someone who cared about fashion, either, and her self-assurance rendered it unnecessary.
“Yes. I’ve been tasked with arranging our travel back to the outpost–” the office slang for Tanegawa’s World, which still didn’t do justice to what a backwater it truly was “–and would like to get started. We have to arrange for a courier rift ship, and I’d rather cause as little disruption as possible to the regular routes.”
“Laudable, I’m sure,” Dr Ekwensi said in a tone of utter dryness. “Yet you have no issue disrupting my day for this visit.”
Shige bowed apologetically. He already knew she was the chief doctor on the team assigned to the new Weatherman – not that her network file specifically said “Weatherman,” but rather “Fast-Tracked Experimental Projects.”
“My requests for transmitted status reports were denied, I’m afraid. Thus, I’ve had to come bother you personally.”
She blew out an annoyed sigh, but the emotion no longer seemed to be directed at Shige. “Mariposa is still keeping all internal mentions suppressed, then?”
“So it would seem.”
“Paranoid fools. Even if someone could slice through the network, any research they recovered would do them no good.” Dr Ekwensi clapped her hands as if to end a treasured rant before it could begin. “He isn’t ready. He won’t be for several more weeks.”
Shige quietly disagreed with her first statement in his capacity as an agent for the Federal Union of Systems. Even if the proprietary research was quite literally of no practical use for anyone who didn’t have access to the unique materials that came from Tanegawa’s World, those sorts of files would be immensely helpful for putting the entire R&D department and most of the upper management of TransRift into prison on various illegal human engineering charges.
Later, he promised himself. When the BCRE regained the teeth that TransRift had pulled. He smiled politely. “I’m sorry, but can you be more specific?” He had only a limited time to return to the planet and foment a rebellion that would go into full force at precisely the right time.
“No,” she said shortly. “Come with me.”
She led him down a series of hallways, interrupted by three separate security doors that required biometric scans. Past the last, the floor went from slightly springy carpeting to smooth plating covered with the same nonporous paint as the walls and ceiling. It was slightly disorienting, walking down a squared-off, pale eggshell tube, with only the steady pull of gravity as an indication as to which way might be up or down.
Dr Ekwensi stopped at a section of wall that looked no different from any other. As Shige halted next to her, the smooth expanse shrank back to a lattice, then became invisible, revealing a floor-to-ceiling viewing window. Through the window was a blank-walled room, the same color as the hallway. The room’s single occupant was almost shocking as a source of color: the black stubble of shaved hair, pale blue veins threading a naked body contained in thin, sallow skin, and, most out of place and shocking, the red drops of blood where needle-fine wires were laced along the spine and hairline-like mesh.
It took Shige a moment to resolve the body into something truly person-shaped, tall and lean and curled up with its limbs tangled, shuddering faintly. This could only be the new Weatherman he was expected to collect and return with. “Is there something wrong with… him?”
Almost, he said it, because it was difficult to encompass the Weathermen as people at times, and his mind rebelled at the thought of coolly watching a person undergo something that looked so like torture. In his nightmares that might be him, after all. He was all too conscious of his own existence as a being created in a lab, just one designed for a job that required more human functions. There were many in the Federal Union of Systems who would consider him an it as well, though there was an unsubtle difference between Shige’s life as an independent agent and that of the Weathermen.
“All Weathermen are nominally male. It’s easier to source all of the modifications to the Y chromosome.” Dr Ekwensi looked at him, and seemed to realize she’d answered a question he wasn’t asking. “He’s perfectly functional. But we’re integrating some new components into his neural net – components utilizing that sample you brought us. The potential is… enormous. We’re going to need new technology to fully utilize it, rather than just incorporating those crystals into our current circuits.”
This was the first he’d heard of that development, though he would have found out eventually. One of the major uses of playing executive secretary was being able to read nearly all of the documents given to his superior. “I… see.”
“I don’t think you do. I don’t let experimental modifications run around unmonitored. But this has come down from the highest level.”
“Ah. I understand.”
“Good, because I don’t.” She frowned. “What is going on at the outpost, that you need unproven resources so badly?”
He gave her a bland look. “If it’s above your pay grade, Dr Ekwensi, then surely it is above that of a secretary.”
She didn’t buy it, he could see that much. “I’m given to understand you’ll be assigned to him as his handler.”
“It is my honor to serve in that role again.” He’d been similarly assigned to the previous Weatherman, though not by his own design. Mr Green had taken a liking to Shige that he’d never understood or wanted. He’d crafted that into his current opportunity, which he’d now need to parlay into access to the research he had no other way of attaining. “Would my presence be of comfort to him?”
She looked as if such a question had never even occurred to her. He wondered if she, who built the Weathermen from the ground up like engines or network displays, also had a difficult time thinking of them as people. Or if she’d argue that they weren’t people at all, merely… people-shaped. “It certainly will do no harm. Just remember–”
“–don’t look him in the eye,” Shige finished. That was the first rule anyone learned when about to be in close proximity to a Weatherman.
“His designation is Mr Yellow. I’d appreciate you reinforcing that to him.” Dr Ekwensi must have sent a silent, local network command. The viewing window reshaped itself into a two-doored airlock of sorts for him.
Shige stepped through. The little sounds of Dr Ekwensi shifting her weight, breathing, and the subliminal hum of the air exchange system cut off. When the door into the featureless room opened, there was another sort of sound – ragged breathing, the sort that caused an instinctive adrenal response just hearing it. And also a rapid clicking that it took Shige far too long to recognize as the Weatherman’s teeth chattering. There was also a smell, a strange, dry thing with a flavor of blood to it, far stronger than he’d noticed around Mr Green. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, whispering directly to his most irrational mind.
He’d never encountered a Weatherman in a state like this. Mr Green had moments of incoherency and strange fugue states, but there’d always been a cause to those that Shige had witnessed. And even at the worst moments, Mr Green had been fully clothed, dressed in the same sort of suit as Shige. Always more obviously subject than object.
This was a test, Shige realized. Perhaps Dr Ekwensi was testing him, to see how he reacted. But beyond that, it was an internal test, of his own humanity. He’d been instrumental in the death of Mr Green, and had little doubt that his presence would ultimately be deadly to
Mr Yellow as well. The power of a Weatherman was antithetical to the goals Shige had to achieve. But that did not require that in the meantime, he must be cruel.
He squatted down by Mr Yellow, though still a healthy distance away. He’d seen how fast Weathermen could move when they wanted. Mr Yellow had his long-fingered hands clutched over his face, twitching as little muscle spasms ran through him. “Hello, Mr Yellow,” he said, slowly and carefully. “My name is James Rolland. Some day soon, I’m going to take you to a remarkable place called Tanegawa’s World. I hope that we can be friends.”
At first, Mr Yellow gave no indication that he had heard anything. Then he uncoiled in a sudden spasm – human bodies did not move like that – and crawled forward. Shige held himself still through sheer will, and kept his eyes focused on the blue line of a vein in Mr Yellow’s shoulder. In the periphery of his vision, Mr Yellow’s eyes were wide, irises and pupils alike black.
He forced himself to remain passive as Mr Yellow reached out to grab his hand. The Weatherman’s skin was soft, smooth, and very cold. Mr Yellow sniffed his hand, like Shige had seen dogs do before – not that he’d ever had a dog, his parents hadn’t had time for pets – and then cradled it against his cheek.
He had no way of knowing what the Weatherman was thinking, but he noticed that Mr Yellow had stopped shaking. He stayed where he was, wondering how long Dr Ekwensi would observe. To fill the heavy silence, he began to talk. “Would you like to hear of your new home? The Corporate tower is very nice. You shall have your own rooms with whatever furniture you like…” He continued on with glowing descriptions of the amenities on the planet. If Mr Yellow understood his words, he gave no sign.
“That is enough for now.” Dr Ekwensi’s voice came clearly through the observation window. “Return to the door.”
“That is all the time we have for now,” Shige said to Mr Yellow, since he couldn’t quite bring himself to yank his hand away with no preamble. He had to tug against the Weatherman’s grip, which to his relief at least didn’t tighten as he slid his fingers away.
“He will be visiting you regularly,” Dr Ekwensi agreed through the window.
A useful victory, then – he had his excuse to return. “As often as I can,” he said, and turned to leave.
Mr Yellow curled up again, his hands returning to hide his face. And then, so quiet that Shige almost didn’t hear it over the fall of his own footsteps, he began to hum. Shige stopped, gooseflesh prickling over his arms, mercifully hidden by his jacket and shirt. He’d heard that sound before, on Tanegawa’s World, a strange song that Mr Green had croaked to himself with a voice ruined by being shot through the throat by Hob Ravani. How the hell could Mr Yellow know it?
“Mr Rolland?” Dr Ekwensi’s voice called him back into motion, and he quickly left the room. It was a relief when the door cut the sound off. He came to stand next to her; she had her lips pursed in a frown of curious contemplation. “You were assessed for contamination before being allowed off world, correct?”
“Of course,” he said, letting his alarm at the thought show. It was a natural enough reaction. “Is that a concern?”
She hummed to herself. “I trust our methods. I helped develop the latest generation, after all. Is there room in your schedule for daily visits?”
Better and better. “I shall see to it, if you wish.”
“I do.” She gave him a piercing look, like her dark eyes could carefully dissect him where he stood. He held on to his bland expression. “I’ve never seen a Weatherman react quite like that before. You might be a remarkable man, Mr Rolland.”
He bowed his head, keeping the role of Rolland, who was exceedingly ordinary, fixed in his mind. “I should like to believe so. I have… hopes for the future.”
She snorted. “Remarkable and ambitious are a combination that calls for caution. Without it, you may end up in an… untoward permanent assignment.”
Personal ambition was not a problem for the man beneath the role; he’d been created to fulfill the thwarted ambition of his parents. Shige sometimes wondered what he would want for himself otherwise, and the question felt like it came in a foreign language. Nurture or un-nature? No knowing. He smiled. “Thank you, Dr Ekwensi. Until tomorrow.”
Chapter Six
70 Days
The desert was a restless, ever-changing sea that erased all impressions almost as soon as they’d been made. Hob had learned this lesson the hard way when it had almost killed her, a bare two days after she’d set foot on Tanegawa’s World. Now it made her vivid memories of blood and fire and the wreckage of a train seem distant, like a story she’d heard rather than lived.
As she drove out of the canyon mouth where the Bone Collector had derailed the Weatherman’s train, she had to jump her motorcycle down a five-foot drop from the canyon to the ground below, something that made Mag grip her waist tightly and choke back a scream. In the light of the two moons, the walls of the canyon were still visibly blackened from the fireball of the engine exploding. There was no wreckage now, though. TransRift had no doubt cleaned most of it up, and anything that remained was buried in the sand dunes that had shifted and flowed, driven by slightly new wind patterns.
If she hadn’t been in that battle, she wouldn’t have recognized even the burn marks. The rocks jutting up from the sands remained the same, but everything around them had shifted. What had once been a long flat of salt hardpan punctuated with the silver lines of tracks was a sea of undulating, orange-red sand.
And of course, to complicate matters, Hob hadn’t taken the Bone Collector to bury himself at the mouth of that canyon. He’d needed the sands, and they’d been a healthy few kilometers out back then. Thankfully, she’d had the brains that day to mark the location on the map stored in her motorcycle’s dumb, simple computer. The maps ran off solar, lunar, and stellar bearings, perfectly tracked on date and time, with the unmoving rocks as the necessary landmarks, and the computers had barely enough processing power to do all of the angles and calculations on the fly. It was the best system anyone could manage on a planet where satellites tended to drop inexplicably from orbit or stop functioning, and where the ever-shifting magnetic fields prevented the use of something so simple as a compass or as complicated as a computer that wasn’t mostly mechanical relays.
Easy with long practice, she guided the motorcycle around and over dunes, mindful of what Mag’s weight on the back would do to the handling. That ease gave her a little too much time to think about what might be coming. Dread it, almost. She’d tried again and again to summon the Bone Collector to her, the way he’d sworn would always work: her blood on the sand. One of the more stupid times, she’d opened a big vein and had to fight off an eager young great eagle while on the verge of passing out. She’d been angry as hell at herself after that, almost getting killed over a man – because whatever else the Bone Collector might be, he was still just a man, and didn’t deserve that kind of power over her. But Hob had never given up on anything in her life, just regrouped for a new angle of attack.
And now she wasn’t sure what would be worse in this excursion: not finding him at all, or finding him as lifeless stone that couldn’t be woken. Not finding him left room for hope, which would plague her in a thousand ways she didn’t need. Finding him completely inert meant having lost one more of the few people who knew her as anything but “the Ravani.” He’d reminded her not so many months ago that neither of them had a lot of friends, and he’d been damnably right.
The map display showed that they’d reached the waypoint she’d set, what felt like so long ago. Hob braked them to an easy halt and nudged her kickstand down with the toe of one boot. A wide pad fanned around it as it moved, to keep the motorcycle from sinking into the sand as it leaned. She held the bike steady while Mag climbed off the back, a little clumsily, then gave the battery stack a fond pat with her hand. The sandblasted paint of the motorcycle, a mottled red, orange, and gray that acted as decent camouflage out on the dunes, wasn’t much to look at,
but the machine had served her well.
“I think my ass is gonna be one big bruise,” Mag said, walking in stiff circles around the small low spot where Hob had parked.
“We don’t normally carry passengers,” Hob said. She’d taken a bunch of the holsters and the two big saddlebags off the back to give Mag somewhere to sit, so it could have been worse.
“This the spot?”
Hob checked her map again and frowned, turning to orient herself. “About halfway up that dune.” She pulled two collapsible shovels off where they’d been strapped on the back.
“That’s a lot of sand to move.”
“Could be worse.” Hob tossed Mag one of the shovels and walked up the side of the dune. Her boots sank deep into the fine orange sand.
Mag snorted. “Now I know why you invited me along.” But she started digging readily.
Comfortable silence sat between them as they both dug, just the sharp sounds of shovels spearing into sand, the hiss of the orange grains being poured away. Sweat rolled down the end of Hob’s overly long nose. She was glad they’d come here close to the middle of the night, when it was cold out in the desert. Mag would have cooked in the middle of the day before they even got half a meter down.
Without anything to shore up the sides of the hole they dug, it became a wide pit by necessity. That was the only way to keep the loose sand sides from collapsing in on themselves. By unspoken agreement, Mag kept digging down, and Hob worked to shape the sides and keep moving sand.
Two meters down, Hob was about ready to give up, though Mag’s jaw was set, her movements focused. It looked like not finding anything, and that damnable breath of hope – for what, she carefully did not think on – would remain. Then she heard Mag’s shovel clang and scrape, like she’d hit a rock.
