Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  She spent the next hour pulling the wheels off every one of the other carts and throwing them in the bed of her resurrected transport. Anything else she found with copper in it, she grabbed.

  With that done and the cart moved to right in front of the bay door, Beck sat everything but the heavy metal baton she preferred as a weapon and her tool bag in the cart and eased herself out the door. No Pales waited in plain view, but they were tricky. Chances were usually high they’d lay in wait to strike at the perfect moment.

  She loped across the parking lots and made her way to the building she knew held the loot that made this entire trip worthwhile. It wasn’t locked—why would it be? The Watch didn’t expect anyone to come out this far. Remnants were afraid enough of them to steer well away from areas they patrolled. Beck let herself in and flicked her light on to reveal a warehouse still a quarter full of miniature universal fabricators.

  They were miniature in the sense that the things didn’t take up a room the way industrial models like the one installed on the Dragonfly did. These were cubes about three feet on a side, weighing in at two hundred pounds and some change. They could, with the right tuning, make just about anything out of metal if provided the raw materials. Making metal powders or granules was the tricky part, but she had time.

  “Should’ve driven the cart over here,” she chided herself. The words echoed in the cavernous room. For a moment she expected someone to reply. A member of the Watch to step out of the shadows and demand to know just what the hell she was doing here. There was no one, of course. The badlands were not a place to stay in the long-term, not without ample protection and planning.

  She spent a fruitless few minutes trying to haul one of the packaged fabricators away and gave up when all that work only got it to the doorway. She’d picked them up when wearing her suit before, a trivial task.

  She had always wondered why the entire stock of the devices hadn’t been snatched up shortly after being discovered, and as she retreated in defeat and went to get the cart, a sneaking suspicion formed. Bowers could have ordered that kind of move. He’d been in charge of the Watch since before Brighton was even built. He was at the wheel when this place was discovered.

  Beck knew the man well enough to understand that he believed in taking what was needed when it came to Reclamation. Something as useful as fabricators could be the tool standing between life and death for a community capable of using them.

  She liked to think that like her, Bowers had a healthy respect for anyone willing to take the risk of coming this far for such a prize, especially knowing they would use it to help their people.

  Which was exactly what Beck planned to do. At some point during her trip, they had become just that.

  Her people. It might take the rest of her life to fit in among them, or it might never happen. What mattered was that sometime in the last day and a half, she’d stopped thinking of the changes in front of her through a filter of temporary circumstances. The work she planned to do with the fabricator would take time. A lot of it.

  Which was something she now had.

  21

  As he did each day after his work training or fighting in the maze was done, Eshton climbed the path to the top of the cliff and took a seat on a large boulder there, and he waited.

  Beck was four days gone, now. Not an unreasonable amount of time, but enough to make him uncomfortable. She was capable, far beyond himself with her level of training and experience, but no one was guaranteed to be safe out there, alone. The badlands were a risk for entire squads of armored fighters. A single person could be ruined by a rolled ankle at the wrong moment.

  He sat on the stone and ate his dinner, freshly caught fish from the river. It was seasoned with some kind of fragrant grass that grew all along the banks with a heavy dose of salt. Scott made it nearly every day, and Eshton couldn’t get enough. He would sit there for another hour watching the sun set before shuffling off down the path and ambling into the small square in Canaan where drinks could be had and music filled the air.

  They played every evening, those self-taught musicians. There was nothing planned about it. No groups of people with carefully crafted lists of songs. Canaan was a small enough community that those inclined to procure and learn an instrument had no choice but to play together as they improved their craft. They knew all the same songs—dozens if not hundreds of them.

  Every night it was the same. Eshton would slink in at the periphery of the crowd, watching as old friends met up and fell into easy conversation. He would order a beer and lean against a wall, taking in the babble, the aromas, the sense of comfortable companionship. It was a thing he’d had in the Watch, a camaraderie that partly filled the void left by his family. He had the luck to learn what that felt like before being inducted into the Movement. Beck wasn’t so fortunate. Everything she did in the Watch was driven by that mission.

  Or maybe she was the lucky one, to have a clear sense of purpose. Everyone was different. The mission might have been the only thing to pull her out of her despair at losing her own family.

  Out here where there were few hard rules for daily life, less structure, and certainly no Tenets to live by, Eshton had come to a sad realization about himself.

  Stein, who had often chided him about not having any kind of life other than his work, was right. Until meeting Beck, he hadn’t left the chapterhouse in civilian clothing for years. He watched almost nothing on the vid unless it was relevant to the job. He listened to music when others played recordings, but didn’t have tracks loaded into his armor to enjoy when out on patrol.

  Somewhere along the way, the quiet and bookish kid who’d lost everything at fourteen stopped diving into fiction as a retreat from the world. In his place was a young man with an almost masochistic need to stare the hard and awful truth of reality in the face until his eyes bled from it. His years of dedication made him an excellent officer and landed him a promotion, but it leeched away most of what made him a person.

  It was not, he realized, all that different from what the stagnation within the Protectorate forced by the Cabal was doing to its citizens.

  Eshton sat and ate and watched the sun go down. He thought about what songs might be played as one guitarist picking out a tune was slowly joined by others. The songs weren’t really begun in the traditional sense; they coalesced from the pieces and parts added by other people.

  Much the way his old favorite stories were told. No almighty voice in the narrative ever laid down an absolute statement about what the story was about. Instead myriad voices would join in, their experiences adding to the symphony of the whole. Those were the tales he liked best; the ones where lives were told rather than rote plot points being punched out one after another.

  A distant crunching noise echoed through the trees. Eshton put down the cracked plate he ate from and lurched to his feet. His blade was in his hand before his mind processed the sound fully. It was not the seemingly random noise of Pale footsteps as they shambled through the underbrush. This was more regular. Almost mechanical.

  The sound grew louder and more insistent before a shape could be made out. Black combat armor, scuffed and with patches of white where a few bandages had been secured beneath rents in the fabric, riding on a small cart badly overloaded with enough junk to nearly topple the thing over. It slewed to a stop a few yards away, and the driver stood on shaky legs, swaying drunkenly before finding her balance.

  The helmet came off to reveal a smiling if tired Beck, flecks of blood dotting her cheeks. “Hey, buddy. Worried about me?”

  Eshton should have responded as his training dictated. He should have given her nothing but professional detachment and asked for a status report. But in the days she’d been gone, he was the only former Watchman in this weird little town and even in that short time his reactions and perceptions had begun to warp.

  He stuck the blade in the ground and moved forward, wrapping her in a hug. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  She return
ed the embrace with fierce strength, and it was good. It gave him time to blink back the tears of relief threatening to run down his face.

  “Can we get this thing down the hill, do you think?” Eshton asked as he studied the cart with a critical eye. “It doesn’t even look like it should have made it here.”

  Beck shrugged. “It’s mostly carbon fiber, so it’s not that heavy. It’s designed to be taken apart easily. Worst case, I can disassemble it if we need to and take the pieces below. But I’d much rather not do that. The fabricator is heavy as shit.”

  Though it took experimentation, they did manage to get the cart down to the first switchback. It was harrowing as the wheel base was barely short of the width of the path itself, and Beck had to carefully goose the acceleration in tiny bursts to avoid sending the thing running out of control. The switchback required both of them to physically spin the cart by lifting it, as did each new 180-degree turn in the path. By the time they were halfway down, a small crowd of amused onlookers had gathered at the base of the cliff.

  Rossi was one of them, and the mechanic was the first to speak when Eshton, who had been holding on to the back of the cart for dear life to arrest as much of its momentum as possible, was finally able to stop and take a breath.

  “Well, you didn’t die,” the older woman said. “Surprising. Looks like a good haul. We’ll get it over to my shop and catalog it.”

  Despite her obvious exhaustion, Beck pulled herself to her feet and crossed her arms. “No, I won’t be doing that.”

  Rossi blinked. “I’m sorry? You wanted my help with whatever it is you’re doing here. And I’m in charge of—”

  Beck waved a hand violently. “No. I made sure to check with Andres before I left. Turns out when someone brings in their own gear on their own time without using any group resources, they’re allowed to keep and use whatever they haul in. Which means all this stuff, including the cart and anything else I decide to go out there and bring back, is mine. Not yours. You don’t get to treat me like shit then demand the stuff I risked my life to bring back is suddenly yours. No fucking way.”

  Rossi glowered and stepped forward, putting a finger in Beck’s face. She clearly wasn’t practiced at threatening anyone this way, because her fingertip struck Beck just below the eye.

  In a flash, the older woman was on her knees as Beck twisted the finger back at a nearly impossible angle. Rossi shouted and the rest of the crowd started to look a lot like a mob in Eshton’s eyes.

  “Bitch, you need to remember which one of us is trained to kill,” Beck said with a ragged edge in her voice. “You touch me again and I’m breaking every digit that makes contact. We’ll see how well you can do your job with your fingers in splints.”

  Beck shoved away the hand and turned back to the cart, jumping behind the wheel. Rossi, pride wrecked, apparently wasn’t one to back down. She leaped to her feet. “You know what, kid? Fine with me. Except you might not have known I have full authority over who has access to resources. You’re officially cut off. You get no electricity from our grid. When you get tired of staring at your useless equipment, come apologize and I might change my mind.”

  She spun on her heel and stormed off, though Eshton noted some in the crowd looked more doubtful than others. Even out here where the Watch was disliked on average and hated at worst, making a solo run into the badlands and coming home alive was worthy of respect. Eshton had listened to more than one drunken patron tell him so once inebriation made speaking with him palatable enough.

  “Fine with me,” Beck said, though far too quietly for the retreating mechanic to hear. She glanced at Eshton. “Let’s get this stuff home, yeah?”

  “Sure,” he agreed, though at that point he would have agreed to anything. He suddenly had no desire to be in a crowd. No, that wasn’t true. The crowd was fine—that he still actively craved. It was the scrutiny he wanted to avoid. The renewed stares and whispers. Beck was fine being a social outcast. That was who she was; independent to the extreme. Eshton just wanted a sense of normalcy. A chance to be around other people without it becoming a debacle.

  He walked beside the cart as she drove and listened to the stream of babble experience told him was her way of distracting herself from how tired she was.

  “I nearly blew through a whole Brick getting this here,” she said. “This thing doesn’t need much juice, but it’s carrying way more weight than it was designed for. Had to replace two wheels. I fell down a little ravine and it took me an hour to get out. Cut myself up pretty badly on the rocks, look.” She gestured to the bandages on her arms.

  Eshton shook his head. “You might have handled that more diplomatically, you know. You may not realize it, but that woman can keep you from working at all if she wants. And she seems like the vengeful type.”

  Beck shrugged. “I brought back everything I could carry from the bunker, and the fabricator isn’t the only gear I snagged. I have plans. Worst case, I have about a hundred meal bars I can live on. Some of this stuff I brought back just to trade for. I have plans.”

  The fabricator was a smart—no, brilliant—move on her part. He could recognize that. Old though the technology might be, the thing would probably still work. They were designed for deep space missions, cargo meant to go on generation ships that would require the same hundred years in space that had passed here on earth. The whole reason the Watch put the energy into reclaiming them was because of how rugged the things were.

  “Not gonna have much room in the house for that,” he said, nodding toward the fabricator. “And I don’t see how any of that other junk is going to be any use.”

  Beck’s grin was, to anyone who understood her sufficiently, pretty fucking scary. “Oh, I never planned to use it inside the house. I’m going to set up on the little patio out front. We’re at the end of the street, so no worries about blocking traffic as people walk through.”

  Eshton scratched at the short beard he’d begun growing since their arrival. “I mean, we’re under the overhang of the cliff so I guess rain isn’t really a concern, but why not sell some of that and get enough to rent a work space?”

  Beck’s expression hardened. “Because I want them to see what I’m up to. I wish I had your ability to let shit slide and just get along, but I don’t. Also I’m kind of an asshole, so I want Rossi to be completely aware of just how badly I’m about to show her up.”

  Eshton rubbed a hand over his face wearily. “Great. I’m sure this is going to work out well for everyone.”

  22

  Beck’s work had to be parsed out into deliberate units and in a particular order to be effective. In the first week after her return, she spent most of the hours in her day holed up in her room. The fabricator stayed outside—there was no stealing it. Its weight alone would have made the task prohibitive, and sitting on a cart without a Brick to power it made the act so obvious for anyone trying that shame would have prevented it first.

  Or so Beck reasoned. In a Rez, this would have been the correct view. Here in Canaan, the reason the fabricator remained unmolested as she tinkered in her room was the simple fact that it was hers. Thievery was not tolerated, and Rossi’s spectacle made sure the news about the fab’s ownership spread to ever corner of the small town at near the speed of light.

  At the end of the week she moved from her room to the patio. Her tools spread out around her—some taken from the bunker, others pilfered from the old red chest in the storage garage—she began assembling components into something too large and ungainly to easily put together inside the house.

  She worked for four hours straight without moving before finally stopping for lunch. In that time Beck barely looked up, and it was only when she stood and stretched that she noticed the gawkers in the distance. They all suddenly had other things to look at when she glanced their way. Fine. She didn’t much care if she had an audience.

  Ten minutes later, meal bar consumed and a quick trip to the bathroom now out of the way, she set herself up for phase two. Thi
s involved hooking the fab up to her remaining Brick, which still had a full charge. When the machine came online, she quickly programmed in specifications she’d worked out on her tablet over the week and filled its hoppers with painstakingly ground metals. This part was tricky; if the parts didn’t come out within tolerance of what she needed, she’d be out of luck. The fab would use up three quarters of the Brick’s charge on the job.

  “Hey, hey,” said a voice. “I got what you asked for.”

  Beck looked up to find Karen holding the leashes for her dogs. Each of the huge canines wore threadbare harnesses with loops of braided steel poking out of the bags on either side.

  “Oh, nice,” Beck said. “What do I owe you? I’ve traded in some stuff for credits…”

  Karen waved a hand as she moved the leashes into one fist. “It was pretty cheap. Old copper power lines are hard to come by. Most of those were scavenged ages back. Steel cable isn’t as dear. Let’s worry about paying me back later. Though if you want a down payment, you can tell me what you’re using them for.”

  Beck grinned. “If you can wait an hour while the fabricator does its thing, I can just show you. In fact, you can help me with the setup.”

  Beck hung from the cliff face directly over Karen’s house and happily drilled another hole. Getting up here wasn’t as hard as she initially expected. When she’d come up with her plan, she hadn’t known the people here had long since studded the stone outcropping overhead with eye bolts. The idea was to string a mesh of steel netting across it to catch any falling chunks of rock, though they’d run out of materials. Beck used the wires running between them to hook her harness to and gleefully scaled the steeply angled ceiling without hesitation.

  “Okay, I’m running the cable through,” she said. “Attach it to the counterweight when it gets down to you.”