Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  “That’s not really surprising,” Beck said. “Booze is the one constant in human civilization. Pubs and taverns survive every catastrophe we throw at them. Probably because they give us the courage we need to survive them ourselves.”

  “Well, at least you listened when Fisher talked,” Scott said. “Though I think he’s a little biased since he owns one himself. Here, let me help you clean up and we can eat.”

  Beck was happy to take him up on the offer. She was a great mechanic, but no amount of discipline or training could rein in the sprawl of any place she made into a work station. The patio was definitely that, now. One of her customers, a carpenter, had paid for the repair of his drill with a simple but well-made L-shaped work table. It was built to be easily disassembled, though Beck didn’t bother with that. Aside from the tools scattered across its surface, there was the day’s earnings to bring inside. The corner of the table was filled with foodstuffs, raw materials, and a jar of credits in mostly small denominations.

  In an effort to stop herself from thinking about the hollow in her middle and how she wanted to fill it with a meat pie stuffed with vegetables and gravy, Beck once again considered the strangeness of the niche she found herself in. Those first few jobs had been a pleasant surprise, but she expected the work to be fleeting. After all, people here could only have so many gadgets and pieces of equipment that needed fixing.

  Right?

  Wrong. Canaan had existed in one form or another since the Collapse. The other communities traded with them often enough to make the import of countless devices commonplace. Extremely old—think twentieth and early twenty-first century—objects that worked without the need for an external power source made a comeback in Remnant society. Not all were vintage, either. Gilead, the quasi capitol of the loose association of that society, contained more than one manufacturer of new gear and spring driven tools and luxuries.

  Beck fixed a lot of them. The engineering wasn’t up to the height of old world quality standards. She didn’t judge.

  This led to a glut of broken things sitting in forgotten corners and dusty storage areas. Remnants had less ability to recycle these objects for their materials thanks to the limited resources on hand, but they were as a group completely unwilling to simply waste them.

  Beck’s little shop was a chance to see if those broken treasures accumulated over lifetimes could be given another chance. Usually the answer was yes.

  “You look done in,” Scott observed, his voice kind and slightly worried. “You can’t overdo it like this, Beck. You’re working yourself to death.”

  She shrugged. “Not a lot of choice. I don’t want to turn people away if I can help it, but I can’t get any further behind in my own projects. So it’s back to my old standard. I’ll sleep less and work longer and count on my youth to keep me from having heart failure.”

  They moved her day’s pay onto the small side table and began sorting it. Food went into the communal pantry, which Beck insisted on. She loved food, especially the real food served here, and was happy to share it. The calculating part of her mind often spoke in Bowers’s voice, reminding her that this was a smart calculation to make. Increasing the general happiness of everyone in the house was a good way to build personal capital and goodwill.

  That wasn’t her primary motivation, of course. She owed Karen, Scott, and Andres for their help and generosity. Eshton as well, for standing with her. One reason didn’t preclude the other. Both could be, and were, true.

  The materials and money she added to the stocks in her room. Messy as her shop space might normally be, everything in the small space was carefully accounted for and organized. Pieces of old technology she couldn’t fix were often taken in a trade, which led to many long nights of taking them apart and using the tiny grinder to reduce them to granules the fab could use.

  When that sorting was done, Beck sat down with Scott and ate. The others would be along at some point. Andres was finishing up a week out at the observation post. Karen was taking her week out of the month to help the council catch up on the chronically behind administrative duties. Eshton would stop by after his shift, grab a bite, then head out to the square as he did most nights.

  “What should I do?” Beck asked between bites. “I’m taking any advice you have here, man. I can’t keep up.”

  Scott, who had wolfed down his pie in a few bites, steepled his fingers together. The single LED overhead cast a faint blue pall over his dark hair and its light salting of gray and turned his deeply tan skin a bit pallid. His dark, intelligent eyes went distant for a few seconds as he considered her words.

  When he spoke, it was with the calm thoughtfulness he almost always displayed. “I guess my answer depends on how you want to be seen. Do you want to be the girl who stuck it to Rossi just because she could and nothing past that? Or are you willing to make that just part of the story and do something more to give back to Canaan?”

  “I don’t have a problem giving back,” Beck said. “I just won’t be strong-armed into it.”

  Scott nodded as if this was precisely the answer he expected. “Okay, then. Since you’re doing so well, I think you can afford to hire a helper. At least part time. I know a couple kids in their early teens who would jump at the chance to work for you in exchange for learning some of what you know.”

  Beck frowned as she thought about it. “It’s not easy work. I spent years studying every engineering manual and textbook I could get my hands on.”

  “Oh, I know,” Scott said. “I’m not talking about turning them into master mechanics overnight. But you could teach one or maybe even more of them how to think about those things. How to approach those problems. Things like material properties and basic mechanical designs. Then move on to the more complicated stuff once they started thinking in the right direction. They wouldn’t have to help you with the delicate stuff, but you could easily have an assistant or three keep the generator going and do the manual labor like grinding your metals down into powder. That’s stuff a sufficiently trained dog could manage. They wouldn’t need much pay, I imagine.”

  “That’s actually a really good idea,” Beck said.

  Scott smiled. “I’ll pretend not to be hurt by the surprise in your tone. It’s easy to forget sometimes that other people can have them, when you’re as smart as you.”

  Beck blushed. “Sorry, that’s not what I meant…”

  “I’m messing with you,” Scott said. “Your cockiness would be less endearing if it wasn’t so consistently earned. So what do you think? Want me to put out the word and see who bites?”

  Beck didn’t think on it long. “Yeah. Having people to help with the grunt work would be great. Plus spreading some basic repair skills will be good for Canaan overall. Never hurts to have a few more people who can tinker on hand.”

  Scott looked slightly dubious. “Unless it ends up hurting your business. Training potential competition may not be the best long-term plan.”

  Beck made dismissive noise in her throat. “Please. If that’s the biggest thing I have to worry about, I’ll be thrilled. That’s just you telling me that if I teach them well enough, people might slow down with bringing me more work. That’s a win-win as far as I’m concerned. If you tell anyone I said this I’ll deny it, but I feel like I might have bitten off a little more than I can chew.”

  Which would have surprised anyone who knew her not one bit. Her team, who she missed more dearly every day, had seen her as a leader but this personality trait was well known to them. They understood better than most the brash and impulsive behavior she spent a great deal of effort to control. It led her into the Watch, then into the badlands, even to the depot.

  She’d acted on impulse and found herself loaded with more work than she could manage. Beck was exhausted all the time and starting to second-guess her actions more and more. In her mind, this felt like self-doubt. And it would have been if the hesitance was only after the fact.

  Beck had begun to slow herself down and thin
k more about what she did before she did it. By most reasonable definitions, this was the first step to wisdom.

  24

  No one heard the alert when it popped up.

  Eshton sat in the kitchen with the others on new handcrafted wooden chairs brought in by Beck. The trade was with the local carpenter—not the only one in Canaan, but John Banks was the councilman who represented craftsmen. He thought a set of simply made wooden chairs were a pittance to pay considering what a common resource wood was out here in the world, but Beck had clapped her hands like an excited child at owning so much of the stuff.

  The kitchen wasn’t really big enough for all five of them and the dogs, so Karen kept the beasts hunkered in the doorway to give the humans more space as they sat arrayed around the room.

  “This is amazing,” Andres said before taking a huge bite out of the savory stew in his bowl. “I could get used to eating like this.”

  Karen, who had devoured her portion in a fair imitation of one of her dogs, rolled her eyes. “You’ve been eating like that for a month. If you’re not used to it now, I don’t think you ever will be.”

  Beck, who sat with her legs drawn up on her chair and crossed beneath her, tilted her head the way she always did when she was curious. It was a holdover mannerism Eshton recognized from those brief months in the armor. Exaggerated motions carried were the only way for body language to be read when suited up. “I’d think with three of you sharing the cost you’d be eating like kings all the time.”

  Eshton nodded. “I’ve always wondered about that myself.”

  Karen glanced at Andres, who looked at Scott.

  “I keep forgetting you two don’t really get to see Canaan the way the rest of us do,” Scott said. “You don’t have friends other than us. Have either of you ever been inside one of the other houses?”

  “No,” Beck said as Eshton shook his head.

  “Yeah, I thought not,” Scott said. “We don’t spring for the good stuff partly because one or all of us are gone a lot of the time, but mostly because we have to pay a lot for the privilege of only living three to the house. There are also fees for housing pets. Actually since we took the two of you in, our costs have gone down. Most homes half this size have six, eight people living in them.”

  Eshton found himself nodding. “Yeah, that makes sense. I should have realized it sooner. Canaan just isn’t that big. I wondered where all the people lived. Thought maybe you had an undercity you weren’t telling us about.”

  Andres shook his head. “Nope. Half of Canaan is sitting on solid bedrock. We want to expand, we have to do it out, not down.”

  “Which is tough because doing that means cutting into the space you need to grow crops,” Eshton mused out loud. “Huh. So why not secure more land upriver or just settle a new spot? I know it would take a while, but it seems like a good long-term project.”

  Karen shrugged. “Momentum, mostly. People already have tough lives but they’re not so bad they’re desperate enough to break their backs doing something like that. Takes a lot of work to keep on the way we are. More on top would drive us to the edge of exhaustion.”

  Eshton saw Beck react to the words by going silent and letting her eyes lose focus. This too was body language he understood. She heard the words and was struck by an idea. Talking to her would be pointless until she was done chewing on it.

  “It’s a shame we don’t have a couple sets of that armor,” Andres said after polishing off the last of his stew. “That would make it a lot easier.”

  “Not as easy as you might think,” Eshton said. “One Watchman can do a lot more than someone without a suit, but six or seven Pales can still take you down.”

  “No, no,” Andres said, gesticulating wildly with his now-empty hands. “You’re thinking too narrowly. Those things were originally meant to be space suits, even help set up colonies on other planets, right? That was the big push before the Collapse. They’re ideal for construction. With three or four of them, we could clear woods and haul stone way faster. Of course we’d need to power them and keep them running, but how much labor would they be able to replace? It’s crazy to me that they’re only used to fight.”

  Eshton bristled, though only from reflex. Andres was mostly right, but close to a decade as a Watchman left some reactions too ingrained to stop. “Protecting. Not fighting. We are—I mean, were—”

  “The shield,” Scott intoned with mock seriousness. “We know. But the point is the same. There’s nothing wrong with using them that way, but Andres is right. How much power, how much potential work, is wasted across the Protectorate every day by the Watch just standing guard on the walls?”

  It was not a question he had ever considered before. But then, Eshton hadn’t had the perspective of a Remnant before. The stagnant culture and society of the Protectorate had many sharp edges and truly horrible restrictions, but there was relative plenty. The sorts of needs the people in Canaan had to worry about constantly were givens even on short ration days in a Rez. Here, the people were one bad crop away from a famine.

  Pales attacked Rezzes with fury—as they would surely attack Canaan if they could reach it—which bolstered the existing attitude toward the armor. They were tools, certainly, but the sort of tools which enabled killing and protecting.

  From the Remnant perspective, not using them as the actual tools they were was criminally wasteful. The amount of good the armor could do here really was incalculable.

  Eshton opened his mouth to say so when the alert went off again. Beck’s head snapped toward her tiny bedroom, and when the second beep sounded she erupted from her chair and flew across the room. Though he had no idea what the soft noise meant, Eshton followed.

  He found her leaning against the wall with tablet in hand. A wall of text filled the screen. She looked up as he twitched the curtain aside and raised an eyebrow.

  Beck gave the tablet a little shake. “The files. They’re unlocked.”

  There was no reading through the contents of the encrypted files quickly. That was a fool’s errand. Thousands of pages of text and messages, half as many technical schematics, all of it too much for a team of dedicated investigators to sort through in a week. Beck worked out a way to search for key phrases once they’d read enough to understand the coded speech and internal lingo the Cabal used, and what came up in that search punched Eshton in the gut so hard he had to leave Canaan entirely.

  The others were kind enough to give he and Beck space. They knew the basic shape of the situation—that there was privileged information on hand and that the pair might not be able to share it—but not the particulars. Eshton was deeply thankful for that. Had Scott, Karen, or Andres had more than the vaguest idea what the files contained, they might have started a riot.

  He sat on the boulder and watched the sky, but for once he didn’t see the stars.

  “What are we going to do?” Beck asked as she approached from the path up the cliff. “This isn’t something we can keep secret.”

  Eshton didn’t look at her. He couldn’t. “Beck, you can’t be this naïve. Do you really believe Bowers doesn’t know what’s in those files? You cracked them in a few months with your tablet and a couple spare processors. Bowers has the entire Deathwatch at his command. He probably had this long before we were exiled.”

  She let out a harsh breath. “Shit. I never even considered it.”

  “Yeah, I know how that is,” he said. They all had their blind spots. His was a difficulty seeing past his own upbringing and broadening his perspective. Hers was in the certainty that she knew better than everyone else. Arrogance. The sort that prevented her from even formulating the notion that anyone else could beat her to the end of a puzzle.

  “They were going to use Fade B on the Remnants,” Beck said in a voice so soft he could barely hear it five feet away. “And Bowers knows? Keene wants to wipe out the entire human population out here. How could he not say anything?”

  It was the first time the words were said out loud.
There could be no other conclusion based on the chains of messages found in the archive—and that was definitely what the server Beck cracked had been. The degree of response from the Cabal in taking down suspected members of the Movement, he and Beck among them, made more sense now. They had inadvertently copied what was most likely the single computer system in the entire Protectorate which housed directly incriminating information about the plan.

  Revolted as he was, the discussions between Cabal members about the genocide revealed a grim and cold logic. Fade B kept the Protectorate exactly the way they wanted it. Order was maintained through fear. But eventually the need to expand would push patrols and new Rezzes ever further west and south. Brighton was already dangerously close to Canaan. Building in this direction would have caused a conflict with the people here.

  And not just a war—in fact, Eshton read several messages detailing how a fight with the Remnants would have been a close second choice to the goal of wiping them out with a biological weapon. The fear, repeatedly and emphatically stated in those messages, was that citizens would be exposed to Remnants in ways that might force them to rethink the central ideals of Protectorate society.

  He knew personally how right those worries were.

  Better to send out discrete tactical units ahead of time to infect the Remnant populations wherever they were found. Look, the leadership could say. These poor people were taken by the Fade as so many before them were. Though they weren’t our citizens, we can still honor their lives by taking over their land and building monuments to ourselves over their corpses. So sad.

  The plan didn’t just break the Tenets. It shattered them. It was calculated evil perfectly in line with the deaths of so many in the Rezzes. He had no doubt it had already played out in other Remnant communities crushed beneath the merciless boot of Protectorate expansion.

  He felt sick to his stomach, but the question still lingered.