Smoke's Fire

by Rich X Curtis

  “Fine,” he said, nodding at her. “Advise me, please.”

  “Own it,” she said. “They’re soldiers. They’ve done a pile of killing since then, so don’t let them smell weakness or fear. When they confront you, and they will, stare them down and tell them that you blew his fucking head off.” She laughed. “Tell them that story you told me, about the car, the parking lot. Tell them that. Chances are they won’t care. Shit that dude was always trashing the military, they’ll probably thank you for it.”

  They flew for a while in silence. She peered down at the bowl-shaped valley. At the far end she could see the little complex of buildings, black and gray in the distance. Just blocks, from this distance. She knew she was painting an overly rosy picture for him. They could just as easily crucify him. Soldiers were odd that way, when it came to politics. He’d taken out the ostensible leader of their tribe. She honestly wasn’t sure which way they would jump.

  “Maybe I’ll try that,” he said. “Maybe it won’t matter. Listen, what are we doing? What’s your plan?”

  “Don’t have a plan,” she admitted. “Smoke says the people who caused all this are up there, at the other end of the space Elevator. So we need to pay them a visit.”

  “You think they’re up there?” he asked. “Up in space?”

  She nodded. “I do,” she said. “I also think they know we’re coming.” She glanced at him. “They must be watching this place, if this is where the Unit fled to. They have to know, if they’re still alive and interested.”

  “Interested?” he asked. “What does that mean?”

  She considered for a few moments, twitching the yoke into line. They didn’t really need to scout the valleys beyond the railhead. Shah had been right, they tailed off into a flat scrubland that looked to go on for at least a hundred miles.

  “People change,” she said. “When they deal with these things. AI, I mean. Smoke was different, before. Before all this happened. I mean he was still an insufferable prick, but he was more or less normal. Now,” she shook her head. “Now he’s deeply weird.” She looked at him. “If there are people up there, they’re different now. And they’ve had a long time to change even more.”

  “Like magic,” he said. “Like they made a deal with a demon or something?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe so, something like that. Plenty of demons to go around, right? Except here, the magic is real.” She thought back to magicians and alchemists she had known. Even her Murta. Frauds, all of them. She grinned. “So there’s that. Real demons. Kind of have to know what’s up there now, right?”

  “I don’t know if I want to go,” he said. “I mean, I thought I did, but it seems like suicide. I just kind of got my life back.”

  “And then you fell in with me,” she said. “You would have died of thirst out there.”

  “There was water,” he said. “I’d’ve been fine.” It was a longstanding point of banter between them. “What’ll happen to the Dutchman, and the damned dog?”

  The dog could come, she reasoned. Worst case they could eat the skinny thing, she thought. She thought, then, like a cloud parting before her, of Thorwald, her huge Celtic…lover, lieutenant? He had kept a pack of war-dogs, vicious beasts he would parade in front of their enemies. Scared the shit out them, that did. But Dog was just one mangy mutt. She didn’t want to eat the damn thing.

  She thought of the likely series of events ahead of them. He was right, in that the Dutchman would need to be abandoned. Park it somewhere at the railhead? The damned blimp had become her home. She sighed. “We’re likely going through the tunnel. If I know Warren she’ll want to go in blazing. Two options. Well, three.”

  “What are they?” he asked. “From your perspective?” He puffed out his cheeks, blew out a breath. “Give them to me.”

  “One,” she said, looking out ahead of them, letting the wind take the course, it was blowing more or less the right way, north by northeast. “You come with. This was a cargo depot, so I imagine the train can carry large items. We’d have to collapse the bag, but that’s not so bad.”

  He laughed. “Not sure what good a blimp is in a firefight,” he said. “And have you ever collapsed the bag before?” He eyed her skeptically.

  “No,” she admitted. “But I’m sure it would be fine. Hopefully.” She grinned at him. “In that case you’d be with us on foot. But she’ll fly,” she said, patting the bulkhead with one hand. “And blimps are super useful in a fight, with a radio. You could spot targets for us. Or we staff it with some of Warren’s people, who have experience directing troops from the air. Only airpower on the planet. So far, anyway.”

  “They could have drones. Truck’s drones still work,” he said. “That would suck.”

  She nodded. She’d thought of that, but the risk was probably worth running. She didn’t say that to Carter, though. “Option two,” she said. “You leave here and meet us there when the action’s over. I think Warren’s going to want to draft you, though.”

  “There’s a third option,” he said. “I can drop you off now and we part ways.”

  “Or vice versa,” she said, casting a glance at him. “You think you could take me?”

  “Not mutiny,” he said. “Give me Dutchman,” he said. “You don’t need it where you’re going.”

  “If we hit opposition,” she said. “Warren’s going to want this thing. I’ll want this thing. It makes sense. You know it.”

  He nodded. The case was made, too good to pass up. “What about Chen? He knows too, about me, I mean. They’ll bring him?”

  “She’ll bring Truck, too, if they can. How big is this hyperloop thing?” she looked at him. “Do you know?”

  He shook his head. “I remember seeing shows about them, some of the designs were pretty large. But it was early, as I remember, so they started small, with one or two seaters. Or a dozen. You’re basically on a sub-orbital parabola, but underneath the earth, rather than in orbit. At least that’s how I remember it.” He laughed. “I hated TV, but now I kind of miss it. So much bullshit on those history shows.”

  “Too much,” she said. “So if they built something this big, they were moving a lot of tonnage up the Elevator. A lot of stuff.”

  “Isn’t that the purpose of those things?” He blinked out the window. “We turning?”

  She glanced at him. “What, give up on your mutiny so easily?” she laughed. “Ready to turn back?” She hauled on the yoke, yawing them into a wide arc that would bring them around, eventually, to the railhead valley and the cargo station.

  “Mutiny? You’d take me apart,” he said. “I’m not crazy.”

  “They’ll say you are,” she said. “You sure you’re ready for that? I could drop you.” She indicated the landscape below. “Say the word and I’ll drop you.”

  He was silent for a while. “I’ll stick,” he said at length. “I ought to check, or try to,” he said. “Check out what happened to them.”

  “To who?” she said. Sometimes Carter rambled, and she only half-listened to his ramblings. Comic books, obscure cult movie trivia. British bands she’d never heard of. He was stuffed with the stuff, eighties mostly.

  “My kids,” he said, screwing up his face. “My family.” He nodded to himself. “If they’re up there somehow, I need to know.”

  She looked back at him for a long time. “You think your kids are, or might be, up there? In orbit?”

  “Could be, I’m here,” he said. “They drugged me. God knows why, but they did.” He smacked his fist into his thigh, once, twice. “My kids could have been part of the crew that went up there.”

  “Odds are slim,” she said. “Very slim.” She could see the logic of it, tenuous as it was.

  “I’m here,” he said. “And the odds on that were very fucking slim.” He looked at her. “So we’ll see.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Gold saw the railhead from the top of Truck’s cage. Li was asleep in their little haven they had created below her. They crested the ridge
, and she saw Dutchman parked on what looked like an airstrip or staging area. Massive cargo gantries, the kind of cranes she associated with cargo ship ports, leaned crazily askew. It looked like one whole rank of them had slowly just leaned over and fallen.

  “Place has been inactive a long time,” she said. Smoke sat on his perch on Truck’s fender. He hadn’t moved in an hour. She’d been watching him, thinking.

  He swiveled his head, looking at her. He looked worn and thin, she thought, his bald head like a bird atop a skinny post. He’d always been thin but this, she thought, was something new. He looked attenuated. Abraded. He nodded at her, but didn’t speak.

  The railhead was spread out before her, as they followed the path of the old highway that curved down the hillsides into the valley. She studied it as they progressed, trying to get the sense of the place, of how it had been. How big it had been, when it was an active cargo nexus feeding the space Elevator.

  Big, she decided. They had been shipping a ton of stuff through here, for a long time. A hyperloop cargo system was something you would build if you needed to move a lot of stuff quickly. Or maybe it was cheaper to just bore a hole through the bedrock than to muck about with surface construction, and with the maintenance headaches roads and railways always had. Weather, erosion, bandits.

  Somebody sometime had decided to do this. She tried to put herself in their heads, to justify the decision making. Big cities had been near here, but not too near. There were scars on the land that indicated highways feeding this place. And skinnier ones indicating conventional railways. This place had been busy, once upon a time.

  She’d tried to pump Chen for information about it, but he stubbornly denied having records about the railhead. She suspected he was lying, but couldn’t prove it one way or the other, so she dropped it. She wondered if Chen’s black carapace would survive a trip under Truck’s tracks. It probably wouldn’t. She toyed with the idea of asking Chen about it, but didn’t bother. One way or another, she thought, this would be resolved soon enough.

  They would either need Chen’s help at the other end of the tracks, at the Elevator complex itself, or they wouldn’t. If they did, they would use it. If they didn’t, Gold would finish the spider before anybody could stop her, or try and talk her out of it. The creature was dangerous. She didn’t plan on tolerating it longer than she needed to.

  If it proved useful, the spider would be tolerated until it was no longer useful, and then disposed of. It was a threat, and would, she suspected, betray them if it got a chance. She studied the Dutchman’s profile as they descended into the valley. It looked like Silver and Carter had set up camp a few hundred yards away from the main set of blocky buildings huddled up against a low rise.

  That was probably the railhead itself, she reasoned. It had once had gantries straddling the large courtyard, presumably to ease loading of the rail carriages. They would be linear, like trains. They wouldn’t need to be sealed if the tunnel was unpressurized. She wondered if the thing was functional, or if the tunnels had collapsed. Plan B, she knew, was a long trek across the steppe, which she didn’t think Truck would make.

  The big yellow earthmover had developed a wheeze. And there were clanks from one of his massive axles in the rear that she didn’t think had been happening back in Changsha. Truck would stay here if they couldn’t move him to the Elevator complex. No way around it. She frowned. Li was fond of Truck, he was a friend to her from childhood. It would be hard for her, she knew, to leave Truck. Maybe there was a way.

  Struck by inspiration, she licked her lips and called out. “Truck,” she said, over the wheeze and clank of his progress. “Have you been here before?”

  “YES,” the voice blatted from behind her. “I HAVE BEEN HERE.”

  She clapped her hands. “When was this?” Smoke had turned his head to look at her. She grinned at him.

  “I WAS PART OF THE GRADING AND HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION,” Truck intoned. “NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY YEARS AGO.”

  She raised a finger to Smoke, who looked like he was about to speak. “What is the purpose of this place, in your records?” Li poked her head out of the cage at the noise. Gold smiled at her. She couldn’t follow their conversation, but Truck talking had woken her.

  “TRANSPORTATION OF CARGO,” Truck said. “THE ROADS BROUGHT MUCH CARGO IN STANDARDIZED CONTAINERS.”

  “How much per day,” Smoke asked. “How much came through here?”

  “MANY CONTAINERS,” Truck said. “ROAD CONSTRUCTION SPECIFICATIONS ESTIMATED ONE THOUSAND CONTAINERS EACH DAY.”

  “No way did they move a thousand containers per day,” she said, scoffing. “Into space?” She looked at Smoke, who held up a palm.

  “Truck,” he said. “Where did these containers come from?”

  “UNITED STATES AND SOUTHERN CHINA AUTONOMOUS REGION,” the yellow earthmover blared. Truck was loud. She noticed some of Warren’s people had turned towards the noise.

  “What kind of cargo did they move here? To the space station?”

  “UNKNOWN,” Truck said. “NO CARGO DATA.”

  She turned to Smoke. “Could be a big station up there, if they needed that much supplies.”

  He nodded to her. “I read stories about space Elevators,” he said. “Back in the seventies and eighties.”

  She nodded. He’d always had his nose in some damned book back then. They had been close, once. Before he turned on them. Before he became…whatever it was he had become. Avatar? Conduit? Before he had truly become Smoke. “So? Remember anything useful?”

  “They needed to be super strong, the cables. With a big counterweight at the end of it, like a captured asteroid, or a space station you built yourself.” He pointed at the complex they were approaching. “This place could be where they shipped the parts for the station.”

  “I figured that part out already,” she said drily. “But how could you move a thousand containers a day into orbit on it? Seems excessive.”

  “If the cable were strong enough, and you had the power, you could do it. The lifting platform would be a ring. Stack the containers in a circle around the cable, and just hoist it.” He shrugged. “Could probably be done. I think the math checks out.”

  She looked at him. “You do that math in your head?” she asked. He had always been good with numbers, she remembered.

  He shook his head. “Alpha and I had this same discussion,” he said. “The last time I talked with her.”

  “When was that?” she said. “I thought Alpha had…left?”

  “She did,” he said, frowning. “Nothing since before we rolled out.”

  “Been a while then, eh?” Gold said. “You miss her?”

  “Something is up,” he said. “At the Center. She wouldn’t say what it was, but she’s never been gone this long before.”

  “You hear her in your head?” Gold asked. “How is that possible?”

  Smoke shrugged. “How is any of this possible? She talks, and I hear her. That’s all.”

  “And she’s gone? Been gone for what, two, three weeks?” No wonder he’d been mooning about. “You think she’s dead?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, nodding towards Chen.

  She shrugged. Probably not a bad idea. Chen didn’t need to know this. She saw then, a knot of riders approaching from the rear. Warren was among them.

  “Company,” she said, pointing. Warren and her entourage filed down and passed close, due to the width of the road. She watched them approach.

  Warren raised a hand to slow her group to a walk alongside the big yellow vehicle. “We’re going on ahead,” Warren called out, above the wheeze and clank of Truck’s engine and tracks. “We’ll see you down there.”

  Gold shrugged. She’d get there when Truck got there, probably by evening at this rate. She waved. “See you there,” she called, because Warren seemed to be expecting her to say something.

  Warren peered at her and seemed about to speak, then changed her mind. She waved her group forward
, and they trotted off down the road.

  That afternoon passed with troop upon troop passing Truck and following Warren’s lead. They all wanted to get down to the complex before dark. She estimated about nine hundred riders, maybe as much as a thousand. Would they bring the horses to the Elevator? Could they, on the train system?

  She glanced behind to see if there were any sizeable remnants of their column behind them. Only the drovers with the mule-train, a few hundred mangy beasts laden with packs. Then she caught the profile of a large rider on a large horse, still high on the ridge a few hundred yards behind the mules. The Archer, picking his way down the road at a slow walk.

  She watched the Archer for a few moments, then looked away. He had his own troops, who seemed to have jogged ahead with the others. So he was alone, behind Truck, and not moving quickly by choice. It was confirmation that he was watching her, or Smoke. Or Truck.

  She glanced back to the luggage stored on the back of Truck. It was piled up high in the rack where they had usually stored the wood for their campfires. The wood had been shifted to each side of the pile of bags, wooden crates, and other tarp-covered gear that Warren had loaded onto Truck. It was lashed down with ropes. Warren hadn’t exactly asked for permission, Gold reflected. Not that she would have either, but still. The pile looked as it always had since they had left the Unit’s fortress.

  She stood then, and clambered up onto Truck’s upper chassis. Truck was on more or less level ground, the old roadbed here was in good shape. Good enough, it appeared, for a straight run down into the complex at this point. Smoke turned his head to watch her, as she made her way back to the pile of gear. He didn’t speak, but was clearly watching her.

  She studied the pile. It was impossible to tell what was in the crates or the bags without a thorough search. Was something hidden back here? She stood and stretched ostentatiously, leaning with one hand on the wax-coated tarpaulin covering the pile of gear. She scanned the road behind Truck, up past the mule-train and onto the figure on the large horse. The Archer. He was watching her. She knew it.