by Ginger Booth
As for the people, Sass wondered what she’d think of Schuyler from peeping into back yards. Richer than Schuyler. But only ground-floor apartments rated the private yard and dome view. Though this was nothing special if the town was a single block deep and fifty kilometers long. They wouldn’t do that, would they?
Kassidy turned the drones up the next street, headed back to them facing the portcullis. This looked similar to what they’d already seen, so she sped along to turn to their right along the wall.
“Got it.” Cope opened the gate before them with a loud creak.
“Learn anything about their tech?” Sass asked him.
“It’s –”
“Sh!” Kassidy stuck out a warding arm. Singing approached from the direction she’d sent the drones. Male voices, off-key, bawdy lyrics outraging a sleeping street.
24
“Drunks,” Sass concluded, based on the lousy singing headed their way. “Opportunity.”
Kassidy frowned at her tablet. “Before dawn?”
Sass and Cope shrugged. They’d closed down parties at dawn. But the younger woman shoved her comm tab toward them for a look through the drones. Three guys, large with beer guts, approached. They wore red shirts – solid-colored sleeves with vertically-striped white and red torso over tight black knickers and black and white striped socks, also vertical. All three wore red-faced masks with little horns, one pushed back onto the guy’s florid forehead.
“Huh.” Sass motioned for Kassidy to hide the alien technology. Then she led the way directly toward the drunken trio. The neighborhood quality degraded from Tudor half-timber to sad brick tenements. She tripped over some noisome trash.
“Hello!” she called out. She forgot to fake a British accent.
“Wot’sat?”
Ah, well, she couldn’t have faked that if she tried. “Excuse me, sirs, but we’re lost.”
The trio stumbled to a stop to stare at her in the dark. “How’d ya manage that then?” One of them flicked a lighter and held it up. “Bloody ’ell.” They made a show of looking the Mahinans up and down.
“Schuyler Jailbirds?” The one holding the lighter suddenly yelled out. “Eh! You don’t support Manxter! Ooh-ooh! Ooh-ooh!”
That last sounded like an attempt to ape a chimpanzee. Sass couldn’t quite make out whether that was anger or…?
“A Bessie and Julie. Dressed like goat’erds, too!” another cried. Sass was pretty sure that one was offended, possibly by her and Kassidy dressing like men.
The guy on the other end was first off the mark. He suddenly ran at Cope, like an American football linebacker trying to tackle. The engineer, no stranger to a brutal brawl, crouched down as though to meet him, then flicked his gravity and hopped a few meters high. His gravity was significantly stronger when he landed on the attacker’s shoulders, driving him to the ground.
Sass lost track of that fight. Because meanwhile the guy with the lighter flicked it off, then lunged for her as though to trap her in a bear-hug. Sass lurched left. While he was still trying to pivot after her, she caught him with a roundhouse kick to his ass. From that momentum, he stumbled forward into her uppercut to his chin, quickly followed by a cross-punch to his ear.
Flailing, he attempted to retaliate with a drunken haymaker. Sass ducked that, then tripped him to face-plant into the filthy street, then sat on his ass to keep him there. Just as she got a breather, the acrobat cartwheeled past her, and finished with a triumphant back-flip, all brightly lit by her camera drones in follow-me spotlight mode.
Cope took advantage of her tormentor’s distraction to tackle another to the ground. This time he rolled with the guy. Sass wasn’t clear on why.
“Tech, Yang!” Sass objected.
Too late. “Suffrus ’ell, they’s fookin wizzuds!” That was the first guy Cope took down, now clambering back to his feet. His second match stumbled backward to get clear, then turned and ran.
Sass’s seat suddenly rolled out from under her, depositing her rump to the ground. He lurched up to run after his buddies, toward the Tudor pubs.
“Wait!” Sass yelled. “We just wanted to ask you a question!”
“Manxter United! Oooh-ooh!” the first runner yelled back.
“Shut up down there!” someone cried from above, apparently woken by the ruckus.
“Suffrus fookin’ wizards!” another of the drunks explained. But more shutters slammed open above. A neighbor threw something that missed, but shattered wetly on impact, possibly a melon or heavy cabbage.
“Run!” Sass growled, already back on her feet and pelting away from Tudor-ville.
Three blocks later, they slowed to a walk, then took an inbound turn, away from the wall to another pocket park. A better class of three-story terrace houses lined this block. Its end-of-street park was a garden aimed at grownups instead of children, with a little maze of hedges hiding park benches within.
They plopped to a seat on the same bench. Kassidy folded forward over her knees shuddering. It took Sass a moment to work out that the starlet was stifling hysterical laughter.
“Got money.” Cope, to the other side of her, produced two wallets. He shielded a glow from his pocket comm between himself and Sass, and started rifling through his ill-gotten gains. He pulled out two sheafs of bills and began counting. Each denomination bore a different pretty pastel color and a holographic strip around the middle.
“I didn’t mean for you to steal it!” she growled. Nevertheless, she accepted one of the fifties for study. Queen Elizabeth was apparently up to version 6. The Bank of London printed the bills with a nice engraving of a medieval bridge over the Thames with a more recent giant ferris wheel in the backdrop. Someone else with a black marker added ‘Journey!’ and ‘Manxter!’
“Good thing we speak the language,” Cope noted.
“Yeah, that’ll help,” Sass conceded sadly.
Kassidy finished taming her chuckles. “So what’s a fookin wizard, ya think?”
Sass considered ‘fookin’ self-evident. “I’d say sulfurous is the local version of rego,” Sass provided. Cope chuckled beside her. “As for wizard, where are your drones?”
“Oh!” Kassidy consulting her tablet. “Following the drunks. The cameras follow movement in this mode. They’re entering some kind of garage, must be ten, twenty blocks, um, clockwise. The door picture shows their masks and uniforms. Manxter United. Any translation for that?”
Sass briefly attempted to explain soccer hooligans. Some things were inexplicable. “Cope, learn anything else?”
He tucked away the wallets. “Bonehead one belongs to the Plumbers Guild and Lammas Alignment, whatever that is. Idiot two is Brewers Guild, Beltane Alignment, and licensed to drive a truck. Both card-carrying fans of Manxter United. But you caught that.”
“And the tech?”
He hesitated. “They’re big on ceramics.”
“Fifty klicks around these walls. I caught that part.”
“No, the lock control was ceramic. Only so much I can learn from a door lock.”
“I never heard of ceramic circuitry. Ceramics conduct electricity?”
“I don’t know squat about ceramics. Materials science is Elise’s specialty. Sagamore and Denali are way ahead of Mahina there. That’s why we recruited her for the warp gate.”
Drat. Her fookin suffrus tech wizard might be less handy than usual. But Kassidy revealed unplumbed depths at spying.
“But I think this is a map.” Cope handed her a Manxter United swag card. The flipped sides showed west-hexagon and east-hexagon, highlighting their supporter HQ. Which Kassidy found lay only a few minutes drunken run clockwise from here. According to the map, they sat in the Manxter district. The inhabited area inward from the wall thickened from here into London, which filled the hexagon point between the two train lines, plus some. Below London lay Midlands. The western vertices showed no blocks inside the wall. They were labeled Scots, Ireland, and Wales. A few dotted lines crossed into the interior, with a few unlabele
d villages.
“That tell you anything?” Cope inquired.
“Not really,” Sass supposed. It stood to reason most of the Brits would live near their train lines. Those were visible from the air. Britain had only two train lines out, compared to Deutschland’s six. That the Cantons were balkanized within as without came as no particular surprise.
What she wanted was a library, someplace to learn surreptitiously. For instance, how did one request an audience with Queen Elizabeth’s government? But the compact wallet card didn’t label public facilities. “I’m less worried about being an outsider.”
“Why’s that?” Kassidy asked.
Sass shrugged. “Everyone belongs to tiny clubs. That makes outsiders a commonplace. I should check in.” She opened her comms to Zan on Prosper. “We’re in, have money. So far so good. Continuing into the city. How’s Ben coming along?”
“No, no!” Milo whispered desperately. The master’s wand worked perfectly. He could walk the wall as though it were the ground! No risk of his emergency rope ladder being spotted.
And this was his room, wasn’t it? He risked a quick light. There was no mistaking his prized Manxter United demon poster over his altar, the scuffed chalk lines of his pentacle under the rag rug. Yet the airlock was engaged, his window sealed against him.
But he’d left this window ajar! Who could have slipped into his room and sealed it? He left six hours ago, while the city slumbered. The 6th floor window offered no outside button to operate his lowly garret as an airlock. If he forced his way in, alarms would sound.
He would lose standing for this, either way. Was it better to be caught entering through the city gates? Or to disturb everyone in his landlady’s stairwell with the atmosphere klaxons? The gates wouldn’t open for hours yet. Then he’d be late for class, too. For he could hardly attend lecture in clothes stinking of the sulfurous nanites.
Yet if he broke his window, he risked arrest for endangering his hostel. He had no money to pay for a new window, and would surely lose his pathetic lease. The master would cast him out for drawing such attention. Three years careful progress as an initiate gone to waste.
Well, that could happen either way. The master was neither kind nor forgiving.
“Why me?” Sadly, Milo decided his best option was to risk the gates and accept the master’s censure. Though he performed the errand flawlessly, and lost a night’s sleep! He might never be allowed to study the wand of gravity control again.
So be it.
But what mischief closed his window? Who could have done this to him? Was it the mysterious airship, and the packages it dropped? Gravity magic was afoot there, he realized. Else why did none of the items drop at a normal rate? He hadn’t been close enough to discern what they were. But their rate of fall was uncanny.
His steps dawdled on his way to the gate. Reluctant to relinquish his borrowed power over gravity too soon, he strolled on the wall instead of the ground as long as he could. And he came to the conviction that not only was that strange hovering ship the author of his woes, but the evil agents must be wizards from Deutschland or Zentrum! For, sad to say, French wizards weren’t up to such powerful magics. His own master was really rather lame.
In honesty, his master wasn’t much better than the pathetic Paris football team. Why, oh why, was Milo born to France?
But what if the Deutsch wizards would take him? If he caught them in their spying mission, especially while carrying a gravity wand to impress them, might he earn apprenticeship with a better class of wizard? Deutschland was an open city. They’d accept anyone! But Zentrum was closed as tightly as France, holding all foreigners in contempt. Still, the wizards could be Deutsch, the most powerful in the world.
Milo’s steps faltered. He must break in through the gates quickly, and track the villains who shut his window! Or, no, there was another way in. It was risky, but with Lammas moon about to rise, its partisans among the troops would exit to the wall-top to greet her. He could fake being a Lammas aficionado. He’d surreptitiously learned their rites during his years of mandatory army service before university.
He’d catch those Deutsch wizards! He must!
25
Ben mused that Remi only translated one word in twenty of Elise’s flirting negotiations with the baker. He raised an eyebrow to the engineer now, to suggest he’d appreciate an update.
“She dressed like a goat herder,” Remi summarized. “Maybe pig?” He shrugged unrepentant. “We have no animals on Sagamore.”
Elise broke into gales of laughter. She placed both cajoling hands on the baker’s chest. The guy looked normal enough when they surprised him by pounding on his door. Few businesses were occupied at this hour. But bakers rose early to prepare for the breakfast crowd. The man was suspiciously thin for someone who made pastry for a living, his pinched face worried by this interruption before dawn.
The baker, Emile, quickly donned a mask when they arrived. Clay recognized the face, Guy Fawkes. They hadn’t realized that Cantons wore masks inside their walls. The outdoor ones were obviously functional. The indoor veneer was thin, fashion rather than breathing apparatus. It seemed awkward to Ben, to wear a mask while kneading flour into dough. Though he’d worked bare-faced until they arrived.
Ben turned away and reminded Remi, “Money. Clothes. Library. She doesn’t need a date with him.”
“Chocolat!” Remi reminded Elise. He held up a kilo box of their wares and shook it. This preparation of the Denali treat included sugar and milk solids, plus a kick of hot pepper flakes. You merely added hot water to make a delicious drink. They hoped to sell the hot chocolate mix to this patisserie for cash. If the baker wasn’t buying, they needed to move on and find another one.
Elise laughed. She and the baker discussed a tall urn suitable for serving coffee to his morning rush, or whatever they drank here. Elise seemed to suggest boiling something smaller than a hundred liters, to sample the hot chocolate. Ben didn’t see a microwave, however. Remi waded in and plucked a small pot off the wall and filled it with water. Ben stepped back in alarm as the baker turned on an open flame beneath it!
The engineer rejoined him. “University, five blocks that way.”
“That’s nice,” Ben allowed.
Clay poked him. “Library.”
“Oh! Is it open to the public?” Access to Mahina University required secure access. But anyone could waltz into a library. The larger settler villes provided them, not just the big towns of Mahina Actual and Schuyler.
Remi listened to another several salvos of flirting, arms crossed. “No public. I think that’s the cash box.” He flicked his eyes to indicate the item. “Elise does not know how much money to ask.”
This was a problem in general. “And you bring it up because?”
“This is what she asks. She wants clothes for us, plus train fare to Iberia. But the chocolate is worth it. He’ll see.”
Remi hated the chocolate, so these words puzzled Ben for a moment. The engineer felt the hot pepper addition was a mistake. The bland Saggy diet centered on tilapia and rice. Oh, no, he was translating again! Ben sighed and noticed coffee cups stacked on a sideboard. He collected five of them, plus sporks without tines, hoping to expedite the proceedings. He and his husband had a contest going today, who’d land in prison first. He dourly wondered how Cope fared on Sass’s team.
Pounding erupted on the baker’s door again. The unflappable Guy Fawkes mask hid his expression as Emile sighed heavily and stepped to answer it.
A wild-eyed youth of maybe 22 pushed in. He wore a smelly cloak with bald spots, clothed head to foot in black. His narrow bird mask hid only nose and cheeks. Around it, his face appeared red, chapped from the acid mist outdoors perhaps. He whispered urgently to the proprietor. He stabbed a finger of accusation at Clay and the others.
Ben froze. But Remi calmly turned off the open flames under the pot and poured hot water into the cups. Elise busily mixed in the chocolate powder. She urged the new guy and baker to com
e taste it.
The chocolate smelled divine past the reek of sulfur clinging to their clothes. The twirly pastries in the oven were beginning to smell mouth-watering as well. Unfortunately, Ben’s translator grew embroiled in sharp discussion with the new kid – Milo seemed to be his name.
The baker moaned with pleasure at his first sip of the chocolate. Then he pushed his mask up to fan his tongue. Yelling at Elise, he grabbed a glass of water to wash out the lingering aftertaste of the chili pepper. Maybe Remi was right. Maybe the chocolate should be served with hot sauce on the side? Ben didn’t envy Jules her task in product development. Can’t please everyone.
Then suddenly Remi was strolling up the wall to the ceiling, then flipped back down to the floor. Outraged, Ben glared at him, fist on hip. The engineer shrugged and handed a long slender item back to the youth. “Gravity, um…”
“Yes, I could see that!” Ben barked back at him. He shouldn’t be showing off his off-world tech while they were trying for stealth!
“His,” Remi clarified.
Elise intervened. “The words Milo uses, I think means magic wand of gravity. Milo.” She pointed to the youth to clarify.
“Ah. I guess Emile doesn’t like the chocolate?” Emile was hollering and gesticulating wildly, backing Remi and Milo both against the hot ovens.
“Mm, no. He threatens to call the…police? Wizards.” Elise paused, frowning, and drank a long pull of her hot cocoa. She too fanned her burning tongue. “Emile calls us wizards. We should leave.” She picked up the hot cocoa mix and thrust it into her backpack.
Remi and Milo side-stepped out of the kitchen, warding off a hail of slaps from the shouting Emile, flour billowing from his arms. Clay was out the door, possibly on the lookout for cops. Ben hastily made sure they carried their belongings, and waved jauntily to the baker.
“Be sure to thank him,” the captain suggested to his materials specialist and French flirt.
