by David Ryker
Ward inspected the floor — lots of footprints, but they were all from the same boots. Only one person had been in the workshop. But the light was on, and he’d watched Klaymo shut it off before he’d taken them into the house.
He sighed and pulled backward toward the door, not satisfied or dissatisfied by what he’d seen.
He did a full loop of the house, looking for prints, tracks, or anything else, but didn’t find a thing. His bike was just where he’d left it, tires intact. If it was him assaulting the ranch, he’d have made it impossible to escape. Slash the tires, rip out the electrics. Something.
He kept going, but with each passing minute, the sky began to lighten, the sun clawing its way toward the horizon, and the evidence continued to mount up.
“Ward.” Arza walked into the kitchen, pistol raised, just after dawn, speaking quietly.
Ward turned, rubbing his eyes, the smell of coffee thick in the air. He let go of the handle of the spoon and it clinked against the rim of the cup. “Hey.”
“What’s going on?” She looked rattled. “Klaymo came in, shook me awake, frantic — saying we were under attack? We waited by the window — like you said, but—” She trailed off, seeing the tired look in Ward’s eye. “What happened?”
Ward pulled his lips into a wide line. “I don’t think there was anyone even out there.”
“What? But Klaymo said—”
“He heard someone in the workshop.” Ward picked up the coffee and took a draught. “Except, he didn’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did you know that Klaymo’s bedroom had a balcony? And a stairway that lets down to the far side of the house?”
“I don’t understand what that has to do with—”
“The only tracks I found in the dirt led from his balcony to the workshop and back.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that Klaymo went to bed.” Ward took another sip. “Then went down to his workshop, blind-drunk, did some terrible work to a chair he’s been making, then stumbled back to bed.” Ward scratched his three-day-bearded chin. “Probably woke up a few hours later, looked out, saw the light was on, forgot he went down there, and…” Ward polished off the coffee and set it down. “Here we are.”
Arza shook her head in disbelief. “No. Klaymo’s the sharpest man I ever met. My father always said he was—”
“Was being the operative word. He’s an old man, Arza — out here alone, drinking himself to death. He’s paranoid, and—”
“Shut up, Ward. I won’t listen to this,” Arza said defensively. “If Klaymo says someone was out there, then someone was out there. He wouldn’t just make it up.”
“No, not making it up. Just forgetting.” Ward sighed and smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Arza, I checked the whole place. Went over it three times. There was no one out there.”
“Maybe you missed something.”
“I didn’t.”
“Maybe you did.”
Silence fell between them like a curtain and stayed there.
Ward reached for the coffee pot and refilled his mug, breezing past her. “I’ll be outside when you’re ready to head back. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”
She didn’t say anything as he passed, but he could see the thin sheen of tears in her eyes. She would have argued blind to the contrary, but he could see she knew it was true. Sad as it was.
Ward was checking a topographical view of the docks on his communicator when Arza swung her leg over his bike and slumped down onto the seat.
The suspension sighed and then settled and Ward straightened, glancing over his shoulder. She looked sullen.
“Okay?” was all he said.
She nodded, not looking at him, the sad and angry look still lingering in her eyes. Though she didn’t seem pissed at him anymore.
“Manage to say goodbye?”
“He can barely speak,” she said, her voice thin and barely above a whisper.
Ward nodded slowly but said nothing more. He’d seen his fair share of that sort of thing in a parental figure. He knew what it was like. He didn’t pry.
The motor hummed to life and he pulled out of the courtyard in a plume of dust and gunned it back toward the city, the ridged all-terrain tires fighting for traction in the dry earth.
He got it up to sixty and kept it there, skimming over the loose surface in a straight line back to Eudaimonia.
Arza kept her cheek against his jacket, below the nape of his neck, her hands loose around his ribs.
The city grew in the distance until the air became salty.
The road switched from dirt to gravel to the usual conductive polymer, and when the little green lightning bolt came on to tell Ward that the bike was drawing power through the roadway, he knew they were back.
A bridge loomed in front of them, the morning heat haze already coming off the salt ring around it, and yawned across the flat and into the metropolis.
Ward slowed and pulled right, circling it on the outer edge toward the port on the other side, its towers rising into the sky, murky in the distance. He kept his eyes on them, picking up speed.
Something caught his attention and he hit the brakes, locking the rear wheel with a screech.
Arza slumped forward into him and grunted, but Ward didn’t notice. His focus was locked on the thing in front of him — a billboard.
It was angled at thirty degrees off the road, looming over the flats that fell away on the left, as if it was there to advertise to them — like the scrubbers would ever be able to afford what was on it.
‘Missing Home?’ the title read. Large red letters were stenciled across the top, above an artist’s rendition of townhouses. A tree-lined street. The New York skyline in the background. It could have been straight out of Brooklyn Heights. Brownstones. Ward shook his head in disbelief. Brownstones. He thought of Sadler.
‘Coming soon. A beautiful residential development. Apartments and homes ready 2343. Available for pre-purchase now.’
Ward let out a long breath and pulled off gently, easing it back up, the same nagging feeling in the back of his head sputtering like a flame trying to take hold in wet leaves. He let it fester and spit, hoping it might grow into something worthwhile.
The Eudaimonia Interplanetary Space Port was about ten clicks outside the city and sprawled into the plains, covering almost as much space as the city itself. It wasn’t surprising, considering how it all worked. Most launch sites on Earth required a lot of space too, but that was to accommodate the thrust burn — or at least they used to. Rocketfuel hadn’t been used in commercial or industrial spaceflight for decades now. It had been phased out in favor of the Martians’ solar sail and microfusion tech. It was ingenious, after all.
The port’s spires stretched into the sky, nearly twenty-five clicks tall each, wide cones of alcrete at the bottom that narrowed into solid columns with little belts around them, evenly spaced moving upward. Looking at it from the ground without knowing what they were must have been the strangest thing. It would have been impossible to guess how they worked without seeing them in action. And as they sped out toward them, they saw just that.
The overcast sky burst, and a huge disk nearly three kilometers in diameter, shimmering in gold as it fell, plunged toward the earth.
In the middle was an empty space with a thick black body curving around it like a giant bagel. Outside the body was a series of spider legs that stretched outward, and strung between them were shining golden solar sails. The slightly concave construction and the hole in the middle meant that it fell straight, like ancient military parachutes, funneling air through the only gap there was.
It fell toward a spire, a ring-toss from space, and as it began to near, the belts on the tower began to turn. They whined and chugged, picking up speed, spinning around the column, gaining momentum. The glow was visible from the ground and Ward eased off the throttle, letting them slow to a stop, the grass waving gently around them, totally unaware
of the technical marvel happening above.
The belts kicked into life and fired a concentrated blast of photons — like a huge laser — into the sky. It spread from around the spire like a fountain and hit the falling sails, slowing them. The noise built to a roar as the sails fought with the light, the air churning and cooking around it.
The sails began to heat and glow and both Ward and Arza had to shield their faces.
The ship fell straight onto the spire, the point lancing through the hole, the lasers measuring and adjusting their force to keep it straight.
The second belt kicked in, and then the third as the ship slid down the spire toward the bottom, slowing with each consecutive hit until it neared the bottom, the conical base widening to meet the inner edges of the hole.
Hydraulic powered wheels pressed themselves against the surface, squealing as they fought for traction, to make the final deceleration.
The lasers cut out and slowed down, whining to a stop as the ship came to rest at the bottom, out of sight behind the walls of the buildings around the port.
Ward cranked the bike back up, the smell of hot metal in the air, thick plumes of steam rising into the sky as the edges of the sail settled into the huge cooling pools around the spires.
Ward followed the access road through the warehouses around the port and pulled up at an entry gate. He flashed his badge to the magic eye there and the barrier pulled itself upward to allow them in. There weren’t many places on the planet that an SB badge wouldn’t get you into. He started forward, a little slower, and wound around another storage building and into a colossal space filled with containers and cranes, trucks and maglev trains ready to whisk away the delivery all over the planet.
The sails were already folding themselves back toward the body of the ship that had just come in — a purposely designed delivery module that ferried cargo from the surface to the geosynchronous dock outside the atmosphere. A single ship could do it all, but using a system like this allowed massive ships to remain in space. It was more efficient from a launch and reentry standpoint, but it meant that goods changed hands at least four times from place to place. That meant there was a lot of opportunity for tampering.
A section of the bagel had opened up and forklift droids of different sizes whizzed in and out, emerging from a roadway that dove under the cooling pools and emerged on Ward’s side of the port. They were grabbing crates and containers in the distance and speeding off down the ramp, appearing a minute later in front of him, following various lines on the floor that denoted destination. The whole process was automated from the look of it, but Ward knew there was a weak link somewhere. Somewhere the cargo was unattended or unwatched. Somewhere someone could sneak something in, or out.
“Let’s find an admin building,” Ward said suddenly, aware that they’d been in silence since Klaymo’s.
“Mmm,” she said from his shoulder.
Ward looked around. Steam was still drifting up, and though the sky was overcast and the surrounding plains filled with dry grass, the air was thick and still like a jungle. He tightened his hand around the throttle and squeezed, unable to shake the feeling, sitting still there in the middle of a wide open space, with not a lick of wind in the sky, that it was a perfect day for a sniper to pick off a target.
12
Ward zipped after a forklift that was pulling away toward a low rise building at the far end of the port. A huge ‘2’ was painted on it, three stories high. It was the office building for this spire — spire number two, the one that had just had a delivery come in.
He tucked in next to the forklift and stayed in its shadow, shielding them from the warehouses at the far side of the port. Arza picked her head up as Ward slowed down to match its pace, but said nothing.
He breathed a little easier in cover, but he still had the feeling that there was a scope on him. A strange sense of weight pressing on your back, like someone was hanging off it, or you were carrying your own tombstone in a pack.
The building began to near and Ward gunned it around a stack of containers and down a corridor between them. They rose up in multi-colored shapes, like odd geometric growths, stepped and jagged against the gray sky. A crane swung in a wide arc above them from next to the cooling pool and dropped its line, hooking on to what seemed like a random container, and hoisted it into the air like it was made of paper.
It swung away and disappeared over the stack.
The container city ended as abruptly as it had begun. It was laid out like a grid, and they’d disappeared into one end and been spat out the other. Ward had done it for cover, but whether Arza knew that was the reason, he wasn’t sure.
The admin building appeared like a huge cube, lines of windows facing out toward the spire. It was almost close enough to touch, and to see the top, you had to look straight up. Ward craned his neck to see. It looked like the tower curved out over him, but he knew it was dead straight. He wondered how much it swayed in the wind. Probably a lot.
He made sure they pulled up on the far side, away from the warehouses, and dismounted quickly. Ward was on edge, acutely aware that his heart was beating faster than normal. Maybe it was Klaymo’s paranoia following him back to the city. Maybe it was something real. Hell, maybe Klaymo had heard something, and Ward hadn’t seen the signs. No. He couldn’t think like that.
He shook his head and Arza fired him a strange look.
“Come on,” he said, heading for the door. “Let’s see what we can find.”
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
Ward didn’t have a real answer for her. “I don’t know. Something — anything. We’ll know it when we see it.” He said it with as much confidence as he could, but he really wasn’t sure what they were looking for, or if there was even anything to find. If they’d smuggled something in, then how would they even know what it came in with, or when?
He pushed that doubt down and entered the building, the sliding doors opening to accept them.
The interior was cool, the reception area a spartan, white-tiled room with a pair of plants either side of a desk that spanned the entire width of it. A glass partition stood atop it, separating the staff from the customers — except there didn’t seem to be any of either.
Ward approached, looking through to the other side. A desk stood stoically, a terminal on top of it. But otherwise, there was no sign of life.
There was a little white box with a grey rubber button on it and a post-it note with the word ‘Press’ written on it stuck above. He thought about what else people might have been doing with it to warrant that sign, and then did what it asked. A buzzer rang somewhere in the next room and they waited patiently, Arza standing beside him, still stewing.
After a minute, a woman appeared, a human in her sixties, and pushed a section of the glass partition aside. She was paunchy, her gray curls bushing out over her round face, a long, sorry looking cardigan hanging off her sloping shoulders. “Yes?” she said dryly. They obviously weren’t that used to getting visitors.
In rehearsed unison, Arza and Ward both touched their shoulders and their badges appeared next to their heads.
“SB?” the woman said, raising a penciled-on eyebrow. “Whatever for?”
Ward wasn’t sure if she was actually asking, or if it was just a musing. Either way, he answered the question. “We need access to the shipping manifests for the last few weeks.”
Her eyebrow went even higher. “Which ones?”
“All of them.”
She laughed, out loud, right in their faces, her voice echoing around the empty room. “Just the two of you?”
Ward nodded. “That a problem?”
“How long do you have?”
“As long as it takes.”
“It’ll take a while,” she said, grinning. This was obviously amusing to her. “The last two weeks? Just for port two?” She looked up, doing some quick sums. “You’ll be here all week.”
“We don’t have that kind of time,” Arza said,
half to Ward, half to the woman. “We need to narrow the search.”
“Perhaps,” the woman began, seemingly interested in the absence of anything better to do, “if you told me what it was you were looking for, I might be able to help?”
She didn’t look busy, and by the sounds of it, they needed as many extra sets of hands as they could get. They still hadn’t been back to the SB, and Ward knew that the moment they did, if they didn’t have something seriously tangible to give to Moozana, they’d be pulled off the case. And Ward would probably be thrown in custody and interrogated about the cyber-doc. No doubt Arza would have the same treatment, and then she’d spill about the safehouse, and the whole thing would come tumbling down.
He realized, suddenly, that she had no allegiance to him. She had no reason not to tell Moozana, even outside of an interrogation. She was gunning for a quick way to the top — trying to outpace her sister. Handing over an AIA sleeper agent? That would be good for her resume. The only way she wasn’t going to sell him out was if she either had more to gain from keeping his secret than from spilling it — which wasn’t likely to happen in this lifetime or the next — or if she cared about what happened to him.
Ward relaxed and turned to Arza. “What do you think?”
She was surprised. She looked at him, her mouth open a little. “What do I think?”
He shrugged. “Sure. We’re here together — Klaymo was your lead. What do you think? What should we be looking for?”
She stammered. “I — I don’t know.”
“Come on,” Ward said, bordering on playful. “This one’s your lead.” He tried on an encouraging smile. It was like an ill-fitting suit, tight and loose in all the wrong places.
She narrowed her eyes, inspecting his expression. It held on his face like it was molded in wax. He wasn’t buying it, so he doubted she was either. It made sense that she wouldn’t be that easy to work over, especially as it was the first bit of warmth he’d shown her since they met. He’d pretty much berated her otherwise.
