Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  “Will do,” Karen shouted up at her. Beck let the harness hold her weight and let go of the wires so she could pull on the rope tied at her waist and haul the cable up to her.

  It wasn’t hard or complicated work. Just dangerous for her personally. Once she had the steel braid in her hand, she detached the rope and snaked it through the governor she hung from one of the massive bolts. The thing was nearly as thick as her wrist and from what she understood was sunk into the rock nearly a foot deep. If anything could hold the counterweight, this thing would.

  She wasn’t an idiot about it. Beck had enough practical geology from her time in the mine to know this shelf of stone was unusually solid and stable. Rockfalls were rare, so it seemed unlikely the added stress on the bolt would be enough to cause a collapse.

  When she was done and the cable was under tension, Beck played out her harness as far as it would go and grabbed onto the now vertical cable. She released the clips and fell free of the overhead wires. Below her, Karen let out a muted cry.

  “What the hell are you doing, girl?”

  Beck didn’t look at the other woman. “Taking the quick way down.”

  She wasn’t lying; shimmying down the cable took a tenth the time crawling up the wires running along the ceiling did. Once she was at the bottom, Karen sat back against the cart with relief and settled her hands on the heads of her curious dogs.

  “Yes, aunt Beck tried to give us all heart attacks, didn’t she?” Karen said in a syrupy voice to her beasts. “She wanted to scare the shit out of us and she sure managed it. Yes she did.”

  Beck chuckled as she finished up the last of the work with the counterweight. It took her another twenty minutes to fit together all the parts she’d manufactured by hand, the ones from the fab, and the few stock pieces she’d been able to re-purpose from her junk pile.

  “I still don’t get what this is,” Karen said as she looked at the bizarre arrangement before her. “I kind of thought you weren’t serious when you told me you were going to run a big cable up to the roof. I don’t get how this works.”

  Beck straightened from the completed device and smiled with fierce pride glowing from her face. She pointed to the large block of stone she was using as a counterweight. It was a cube of sandstone building material just over eighteen inches on a side. “That’s a counterweight that weighs about a quarter ton. Up there is a governor that will stop it from falling if there’s a failure down here, as well as help control the rate of descent of the stone during normal operation.”

  Karen frowned. “Normal operation of what?”

  Beck carried on as if she hadn’t spoken. Now she pointed to the contraption bolted to the patio, which the steel braid ran through. “That right there is a generator. Next to it is a manual winch with a heavily modified gear ratio. See how the cable runs through all of it?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Karen said. “So this thing makes power?”

  Beck nodded excitedly. “Yes! See, I winch the block up like this…”

  She did, though it took a lot longer than expected. The cube of stone rose up until it reached the stops preventing it from damaging the governor. Beck pointed up at it. “So thanks to all my work just now, that stone has a ton of potential energy. Gravity does a lot of the work. All I do is plug the Brick into the charger attached to the generator here,” she did, then straightened, “and hit the switch.”

  She slapped the master control and the already tense steel cable gave a tiny pling as it moved ever so slightly. The generator, its gears also heavily ratioed, spun to life. The small LED indicator showed positive power flow.

  “And there you have it,” Beck said. “We now have a new source of energy. All I’ll need to charge the Bricks is time and some sore arm muscles. It’s all ours.”

  Karen gaped at the setup. “Seriously? That’s…Beck, that’s amazing. You just put all this together?”

  “Well, no,” Beck said. “I had to rebuild a lot of it and part of why it took me so long out there was having to find magnets I could use when I re-purposed the electric motors into generators. That part was a little complicated. I spent about a day looking over the specs for the river turbine and had to work backward from there to figure out what RPMs this one would need. The relationship of the magnets to the coils is—”

  Karen waved her hands in defeat. “Whoa, okay, slow it down before you need to change your pants. I’m impressed. You can stop.”

  They watched the power gauge tick up by a single percentage point. It took a long, long time.

  “Doesn’t seem super efficient,” Karen noted, glancing at the slowly descending counterweight.

  Beck shrugged. “It’s not. But I don’t have to power a whole town. Just charge up the Bricks so I can use the fabricator to make new parts. I still have a bunch of material left over, and I can make runs to get more. Basically I did all this so I could work on the real project without using any Canaan resources to do it.”

  Karen laughed. “Holy shit, kid. You put yourself in all that danger and did all this work just to be able to do something else entirely? That’s kind of insane, you realize.”

  Beck perked up almost pridefully. “I like to think of it as single-minded devotion to a cause. I’m kind of famous for that.”

  “Yeah, I think I’m starting to get that,” Karen agreed. “So what’s the real project?”

  Beck picked up her tablet and tapped open a file. She turned it toward Karen. “This. A brand new turbine for the river. If I make a few runs back to the depot I got all this stuff from, maybe do a little scavenging elsewhere in the badlands, I might be able to do it in a few months. A lot faster if I didn’t have to scrounge up everything on my own. But once I have a regular source of energy with the new turbine, this fabricator will be able to crank out new parts for as long as we can feed it materials. We can make just about anything with it.”

  Karen stared at Beck for an uncomfortably long time before the younger woman finally gave in. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Huh?” Karen said, shaking herself. “Oh, sorry. I was just trying to work out how I can make this easier for you. I mean, I am on the council here. I’m pretty sure I can convince the others to override Rossi and give you priority access to the power supply, at least during slow usage times. Maybe set aside some raw materials for you to use.”

  Beck considered this for a few seconds. “But that would mean putting the stuff I make into public domain, right? Using communal resources means I have to dedicate a proportional amount of my output to the community?”

  Karen nodded. “Sure, but that’s how it’s done here.”

  Beck shook her head. “No, that’s how you say it’s done here. That’s the line people like to spout, but it’s only true in the letter of the law rather than the spirit. People in Canaan use contracts for everything. You trade for the tiniest stuff and pretend it’s all for the greater good. I got no problem with people tracking every little favor and transaction if that’s how they want to live, but if the choice is between being forced to give back to people who’ve treated me like shit or risking my life to do it on my own, I know which one I’ll choose.”

  Karen looked aghast. “That’s not fair. I’m not trying to play a card here, kid, but we took you in. You know not everyone is trying to get something from you.”

  “You aren’t,” Beck agreed. “Andres and Scott aren’t. But please don’t play the community enrichment angle here. I come from a place where people actually provide for each other, not just as a game of status to make themselves feel better. Rossi could have listened to me and let me help her. I’d have brought this fab back for everyone to use if she’d have just heard me out. Canaan would have been far better off for it, but she had to make sure I knew who held the power. She’s on the council, but was she thinking about the group first when she made her power play?”

  Karen blinked and flinched back at the harsh words, and Beck could see she’d scored a hit. “That’s different.”


  “No, it’s not,” Beck said with a shake of her head. “You’re just telling yourself that. One of the most crucial people in this place, a leader, shut down help being offered to her just because it was me who was offering it. You know what? I’m fine with that. I’ll go out into the badlands and spend every day eating meal bars until they run out just to do this on my own hook. I’ll show her and the rest of the people here what people from a Rez are capable of. I’ll show ’em that the Deathwatch aren’t coddled killers like they think we are. In a few months, I’ll match and improve the power system that sour old bitch has spent years just trying to keep running, and I’ll make sure she fucking knows it’s because I had the guts to go out into danger to make it happen.”

  Karen looked at Beck, who was less than half her age, with a species of dumbstruck awe. “Jesus, kid. That has to be the farthest I’ve ever heard anyone go just to be petty. I love it. I kind of want to be like you when I grow up. What can I do to help?”

  23

  Over the next month, Beck’s life changed in ways she could not have predicted.

  She was smart, but raw intelligence alone does not give a person the ability to see around every corner or prepare for every consequence. This was doubly true for her; Beck wasn’t as aware of people and their motivations as even the average person. Chalk her ignorance up to years spent in isolated conditions without socialization outside her work and family.

  In the first week she went out into the badlands four more times. One of those was back to the depot, though this time she brought back only parts and materials. Taking one fabricator was a necessary risk. Two felt like pushing luck for no good reason.

  The other three were to the ruins of towns much closer to Canaan but too badly destroyed by the elements to be worth the Watch’s time. Hours of work stripping materials from old homes and businesses—and any other structure or vehicle she could find—yielded smaller results than any reclamation trip she’d made in her armor.

  For her, those results were relative. By Protectorate standards, a cartload of steel and copper with scavenged tools and parts mixed in wasn’t worth the energy it would cost to send out even a single carrier full of Watchmen.

  But for Canaan, for her, these were invaluable supplies.

  That first week after turning on her generator was spent gathering. She did almost no other work beside sleeping.

  The second week saw her back at her post, sitting on the stone patio and working tirelessly. People came and went. Once they saw she wasn’t going to pay them any mind, the gawkers stopped being demure and observed her openly. The crowds tended to thin when she worked on her tablet and they vanished when she fell into one of her long periods of simply watching the screen.

  In between those long bursts of activity, Beck still watched her decryption program bash away at the stolen files. Her need to stare at the screen lessened over time as the other work took more and more of each day, but once in a while she couldn’t help but fall into the flashing display and hope that the act of watching would change the outcome. It was the Observer Effect writ large, or would be if it had worked.

  Toward the end of the second week, one of the watchers approached. Beck heard the scrape of worn boots against the gritty stone and looked up. A young woman with a baby strapped in a carrier on her back awkwardly hauled a somewhat pyramidal device about four feet tall toward Beck. It was made of tubular metal, clearly of old world design, and had a scoop-shaped seat hanging down from the apex.

  “I was wondering if you could fix this for me,” the young woman said, setting the thing down. She pushed a lock of black hair behind her ear nervously. Whether this was because she would rather not speak to the town pariah or because doing so might paint her with the same brush, Beck didn’t know.

  “Why don’t you ask Rossi?” Beck asked. Not angrily or with accusation. She just wanted to know.

  The young woman shook her head. “She says she’s too busy. Has to prioritize work. I have credits. I can pay.”

  Beck decided she liked the sound of that. “How much? And what’s your name?”

  “Sameen,” the woman said. “I have twenty I can spend.”

  There was clear discomfort in the words, and it made Beck pause to consider.

  Sameen was clearly tired as any young mother was likely to be. The dark circles under her eyes combined with the worn clothing and slightly disheveled state of her appearance to suggest the money was more than she was really safe to part with. Beck frowned. “Uh, okay. I can’t really say whether I can do it without knowing what this thing is.”

  Sameen shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what she heard. “Sorry? It’s a rocker. See the seat? You don’t have these in the Rez?”

  Beck shrugged. “I’ve never seen one, no. How does it work?”

  Sameen pointed to the seat. “You put the baby in there, then turn this crank here at the top. It winds up and rocks the baby to sleep. Alice is in one of those phases where it’s the only thing that will knock her out, and it stopped working a few days ago. Please, I need your help. I haven’t had two hours of sleep next to each other in three days.”

  Well, that explained a lot. Desperation would drive people to do incredible things. Beck’s exile was proof of that. Bowers had aimed the Cabal’s attack at her and Eshton to contain its damage. Next to that, being seen as the mechanic of last resort was almost quaint.

  “Okay, let me take a look…”

  Sameen might have expected Beck to do as Rossi was known to and tell her to come back later. That she would get to it when she had time. Beck’s projects ran on whatever schedule she wanted, however, which meant she had all the time she needed. With a few minutes of work she popped the casing off the apex of the rocker and looked at the simple set of gears and tension springs within.

  She turned the crank and observed the lack of motion, though that single look told her all she needed to know about how the mechanism was supposed to function.

  The mechanism itself had no obvious problems. Beck bit the inside of her lip as she switched the LED light of her tablet on and shined it inside the space where the crank was seated.

  “Ah, there you are,” she said. A bit of work with a screwdriver had the crank free; it had snapped along the shaft right next to where it connected with the internal structure it tightened. She put the pieces back together and grabbed a small reference ruler, just a piece of polymer with standard sizes on it, before taking a picture with her tablet. This she fed into the fab before pecking out a few fixes. She checked the dimensions of her programmed part against the actual crank, then set the fab to work.

  All told, the fix took about twenty-five minutes. Most of that was machining the new crank. Once it was in place, Beck gave it a wiggle to make sure everything fit well and gave it a few gentle turns.

  The gears engaged. The springs grew tense. The seat began to slowly rock.

  “Oh, thank you so much,” Sameen said, nearly in tears with happiness. “That thing has saved me from going crazy. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Here, take the credits.” She offered the small chips of carved stone, which Beck waved away.

  “No, you keep that for your kid,” Beck said. “You’re my first customer. This one is on me.”

  Sameen seemed ready to argue this as most Canaan citizens would, but practicality won out. She would rather have the money just in case than worry herself sick if something else went wrong. “Thank you. Though that’s not really a good business practice.”

  Beck smiled knowingly. “Honey, you say that like I’m very likely to have any other customers. Pretty sure you’re the only one.”

  Rare as it was, in this Beck was dead wrong.

  At the end of the next week, Beck was beginning to become overwhelmed by work. There weren’t all that many people in Canaan, at least not full time. Perhaps two thousand Remnants lived there on any given day, the number fluctuating by a few hundred over the course of a week as those who lived mostly in the wild filtered i
n to trade. She spent some time in the market and watched these wild men and women haul in game from rabbits all the way to deer and bear. Some of them needed her to fix things for them as well, and they came in a steady stream.

  Word of mouth was a great thing, but her own projects were suffering. Much of the repair work could be completed without taking the fab offline from its normal projects, but the increasing business made those down times more and more frequent. She couldn’t fix the problem by taking another one from the depot, either. Not only did she not have the energy resources at hand to run a second—the one she had already took a ludicrous amount of work to keep running—but by now the Watch would have secured the depot. Probably nothing she couldn’t break through with enough time, but Beck knew the ways of the Protectorate well enough to be sure there were dozens of cameras festooned around the place where none had been before.

  As she finished up for the day a few weeks after setting up shop, Scott came out of the house as he always did when the work was over. Beck completed the last few cranks of the generator, hauling the stone back up to its apex so it could impart as much of a charge as possible before she had to come out and do it all over again, then straightened.

  “Good haul today,” Scott said, wiping his hands on a ragged towel and tossing it over his shoulder. “I just got done making the pies for dinner if you’re hungry.”

  Beck’s mouth watered. It had been a particularly busy day, and her lunch was a meal bar as usual. “Venison?”

  Scott nodded. “It was worth taking you in for that if nothing else. We don’t get deer meat or the ingredients to make bread very often, and you managed to bring in all three. I should be paying you.”

  Beck shook her head. “Nah, it’s just covering the rent, if that. People want to pay me in food, the least I can do is share the wealth a little. Besides, I fucking hate cooking. I’m happy to pay for the convenience.”

  Scott laughed. “Weird that there used to be entire industries based around that very idea, don’t you think? Now the only ones left are bars.”