When the River Ran Dry

by Robert Davies

  “Still, it’s probably going to take days, right?”

  “Not for those boys; they scoured around non-stop and pulled everything out to the evidence vans—more stuff than anyone has ever seen in one place. Just like that—bang, bang, bang, then they locked it up and went downtown. You’d never know they were there!”

  At last, Ricky had what he needed. The MPE investigation was complete, paving the way for him to slip in under cover of night and look where no cop would’ve thought to try.

  “Damn! Well, it’s not going to break my heart if the magistrates send them to the cylinders; they’re both assholes and they made life hard on a lot of people.”

  Ricky had to pass through the obligatory small talk, simply to avoid tipping his hand. Begging off now, he reasoned, Ritnour might notice and wonder why.

  “Oh, they’re on their way, believe me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The stuff they found laying all over that building was more than enough evidence; they won’t be seeing daylight again any time soon, not if the Magistrate’s prosecutors have anything to say about it.”

  “Good!” said Ricky. “It’s gonna be interesting to see who fills the gap, now that these idiots are gone, especially Courtnall; he’d slit your throat for looking at the clock wrong.”

  “He won’t have the chance,” Ritnour declared; “When they get you with that much contraband, you’re pretty much screwed.”

  “Have you heard something else?”

  “Nothing I can tell you, Slider! I know your network goes all the way up, but my job is more important to me than your next score!”

  “That’s a shitty thing to say.”

  “Maybe, but it’s also true!”

  Ricky smiled again. It had been a nice chat, but Ritnour was still cautious enough to watch his words; the strange relationship between cop and street hustler hadn’t changed and Ricky’s signal to withdraw had been given.

  “I’m gonna head out.”

  “Okay, Slider; mind how you go.”

  Ricky paused for a moment before leaning close to whisper up at Ritnour.

  “You need anything from me?”

  Ritnour smiled and shook his head.

  “Not today, but thanks for asking.”

  Ricky nodded and stepped quickly through the rain, but as he went, Ritnour’s smile faded. He watched for a moment, waiting until the Slider disappeared before tapping a call code into his wrist comm.

  The ride went slower than usual as maintenance crews struggled yet again with a pod train stuck on its overhead rail between stations in the pouring rain. When at last he turned down the alley for home, Ricky felt the excitement building with each step. The other hustlers, he thought with a grin—those saps who went along with the rest like stupid sheep—would never consider such a thing. If he could get out to the Industrial Zone and search the old machine shop before anyone else thought to try, the bounty would be considerable and more than enough to stock his account at the theater for nearly endless sessions. As he tossed his bag on the floor beneath the window, Ricky ran through his mind the steps needed to make it to the Zone and home again undetected.

  The problem of enraging psychotic murderers like Espinoza and Courtnall had been removed by their timely arrests, but the Watchers could foul things considerably. Those dull, civilian misfits MPE maintained to stare at status displays and transit access records ‘round the clock from a bunker downtown might have been instructed to search for telltale signs inside system alerts. Perhaps, Ricky thought, anyone curious enough to go out that far, especially late at night, would show when their identification scans registered a trip on the pod train that made its turn near the borders of the warehouse compound. When they did, he knew, the Watchers would see it immediately and react. Instead, he would have to follow a different path, and one followed completely off the grid.

  It was far enough to the Zone to rule out trying it on foot, but that meant hopping a local land freight, or asking Vinnie to borrow his father’s delivery van. In the end, he opted for the guaranteed anonymity of the surface freight trains; Vinnie was another pair of eyes who would see and know—another risk to be taken and interrogated if MPE ever came to suspect.

  Ricky pulled his boots from tired feet and tossed them aside, intent on getting sleep before his journey that would begin in the hours after midnight. The rains would be heaviest in the early morning hours, the news vids insisted, making it unlikely his movements would be noticed; MPE rarely bothered to patrol on foot without a reason, especially in horrid weather. Once more, he settled and let his mind wander. When he faded, his last thoughts were only of Neferure. He remembered her excitement at the prospect of the fearsome Apheru, finally approved and named as her suitor. Soon, Ricky thought in the sweltering darkness, his rise through the layers of court politics would be secured by the word of Pharaoh herself; no one would stand between them again.

  Ricky slipped quietly from his flat as the huge chronometer in the center of Morrissey Square clicked over to 1:12. Despite the late hour, it would take time to walk the distance between his home and the low-speed tracks where cars of still-glowing alloy ingots were shunted through the darkness from the new foundry, destined for noisy rolling presses and hammers of metal processing plants on the border where the Zone met the canals—bleak, soulless and mostly deserted.

  Aboard an empty flat car, Ricky watched through the darkness as the train clacked and trundled beyond the Sector border into the wide spaces between habitat cells where identical, ten-floor apartment structures loomed in neat rows. It was mercifully cooler than the days before and a heavy blanket of fog had drifted in from beyond the wire to linger across the entire Zone, ghostlike and eerie. Most would dread the prospect, but for Ricky, the heavy mist was a silent ally that would frustrate the view for anyone who might have noticed on clearer nights.

  As the freight slowed around a wide curve, Ricky looked for his chance. The fields and vacant lots gave way to the first darkened structures where a footpath aimed directly and suddenly toward the Zone as Ricky’s comm clock showed 2:43. Well beyond the busier neighborhoods (and any nuisance an MPE checkpoint would make), he turned toward the old cracking plant where monstrous pressure vessels and connecting pipes stood in silence, silhouetted against the pale gray cloud cover.

  But it was not the blackened, malevolent shapes in the twilight that were disturbing to Ricky—he’d made the trip before. Instead, it was the likelihood others waited within that brought a nagging sensation of dread as he padded silently through soaked, ankle-high weeds between two control stations. Streeties—hungry, feral and desperate—often took shelter against the rain in old, empty structures where few dared to venture, especially at night. Once roused, they would gladly run down and attack a loner so far out from the safety of the Sector’s lights and MPE patrols.

  After twenty minutes, the angular shapes appeared slowly out of the fog as Ricky drew near. A heavy chain fence encircled a dozen structures within, three meters tall and fitted with elaborate, endless coils of razor wire; an effective barrier that kept out all who came without the lock codes to one of the gates or knowledge of another way inside, especially wanderers or streeties looking for a haven against the weather.

  The complex went dormant years earlier when the Zone’s output dwindled. Each new plant moved deep below the surface into the cavernous, subterranean factory district meant one less on the surface. A handful of fabrication shops remained in the control of one property group or another, while the rest waited for a demolition team’s torches. Suddenly a deserted and forgotten place, the warehouse enclave’s solitude made for Ricky an ideal condition suited perfectly to searching about in the dead of night.

  Nearly a decade passed since Mister Anthony brought him along on a ‘business trip’ to meet with some of his associates, but Ricky understood when Courtnall waited for them at a narrow gate on a dark and blustery autumn day. Even then, Ricky knew Mister Anthony’s affairs were mostly illegal, bu
t he kept quiet and took in all he could against the day when his first missions running for the old master brought him money no apprenticeship in the factories could match. In the dank, humid silence, Ricky paused again and remembered the stern faces of Courtnall’s men, dressed in cheap, shiny suits only thugs on the street seemed to wear, palming guns none of them felt the slightest compulsion to hide. As Mister Anthony chatted with Courtnall, Ricky had made a purposeful survey of his surroundings, determined to memorize the details in a place where remaining ever alert often meant the difference between life and death.

  In those early days, it was intoxicating for a kid from the housing blocks; plastic cartons full of new tokens were stacked beside tables heaped with the illegal treasures he would eventually route between the streets and the Uppers years later as a matter of course. A skinny, quiet boy who watched and listened more than he spoke, Ricky noticed everything, but mostly those places where Courtnall and Espinoza locked an office door behind them, or pulled back a stack of empty crates beyond the sight of others.

  He watched it all, flicking a thumb against his ring finger nervously in the silence, surrounded by five or six menacing brutes who did the unspeakable things the Bosses ordered—people like Junkyard. So long ago, he looked and learned, committing to memory a floor plate’s location here, or a collection of solvent barrels there. The early days brought thrilling and dangerous missions when Mister Anthony entrusted him at last with those tiny packages, but he knew even then it was tomorrow that held more promise than today; Ricky was learning how to become the Slider. Ten years later, the effort was about to pay off as he found a rusted, metal hatch concealing a drainage culvert and slipped unseen inside, struggling to make his way in ankle-deep rain water and sand collected at the bottom of a two-meter, concrete tube. When he climbed crude, metal rungs set into the cement of a vertical pipe, feeling his way in the echoes and darkness, another hatch opened onto the muddy ground thirty yards beyond the barrier; at last, he was inside the fence.

  Ricky waited a moment, turning in a slow circle to inspect the wide apron between the ends of two warehouses. At once, he knew where the target building hid in the mist, making the short walk down a row of outbuildings and smaller workshops in minutes. Finally, the blood-red warehouse loomed, dark and quiet before him. A tiny hatchway, hidden behind an old freight container, had never been locked and when it gave way easily to his touch, Ricky smiled in silence. A moment later, he stood alone inside the building where only hours before, a swarm of policemen and investigators played the beams of their bright hand lamps in a vain attempt to find something more to help convict the two Bosses and add to an already lengthy jail term. Ricky knew the answer would be revealed near an office and the secret place it kept hidden from unwanted eyes.

  He moved quickly across the oil-stained floor, cluttered with cast-off junk and personal rubbish, avoiding shallow puddles of water made by leaks from the aging roof panels above. The place still held the stink of grease and chemicals, but he reached the little office where it sat, solitary and exposed on the north end of the building. At once, the memories returned; he could hear Mister Anthony’s strange twang, yattering with Courtnall in deliberate, careless tones. But more than that, he remembered the ancient, metal shelving where it lay flush against the office wall.

  With a knowing smile, Ricky pulled an empty rack forward a few inches, careful to lift it from the floor and avoid the metallic screech that might betray him to anyone lurking nearby. There, as it had always been, a small grate—heavy and serrated across its upper edges—lay neatly into a drain trough. It looked to the unsuspecting eye as if the filth, sludge and mud from decades of use had left it completely clogged, but Ricky knew better. He positioned himself directly above and pulled. At once, it came free and he set it carefully onto the floor to look inside the trough. A thin, sheet metal pan filled with muck came free with little effort, revealing two small compartments recessed into one side of the trough’s concrete sides, confirming what he so desperately needed to see; the Bosses left behind a prized possession and MPE bunglers had missed it entirely.

  Wrapped in dark canvas, two small containers opened with ease and inside each were a dozen token transfer chips, data sticks and bits of jewelry. Ricky could only guess as to their value in the underground markets where burglars and stick-up men traded their stolen loot, but it followed that anything held and carefully concealed by Courtnall and Espinoza would necessarily be counted as rare or exceedingly valuable. Moving quickly, he stuffed the contents into his bag and secured it on his back, retracing his steps to the little hatch. A few minutes later, he was once again outside the fence line, resisting a temptation to run and determined to avoid being noticed should anyone linger unseen in the fog. A slow freight ride would have him back inside Sector 4 in an hour’s time.

  It was nearing 4:30 when Ricky pushed open the door of his flat and slipped inside. If Mrs. Abber was watching, she would likely suspect only his customary return from normal, evening rounds, but it didn’t matter; he had what he needed and with it, the way to a better life. He laid the pack carefully behind his couch near a wall so that no one would notice. It had been weeks since Litzi’s last visit, he thought suddenly; it wouldn’t do if his sister saw and looked inside.

  He leaned wearily against the counter in his kitchen and opened a can of diluted fruit concentrate with a loud snap. In the silence, he sipped the cool juice, letting it slide down his parched throat slowly. It was best to wait, he thought, just to be sure; the cops could look and look, but the race had already been won. Soon, the infonets would tell a woeful tale of conviction for crimes against the people of Novum and life-ending jail sentences, putting Courtnall and Espinoza’s once-grand syndicate out of business.

  With luck, the other Bosses would hesitate before moving in, if only to maintain a discrete distance until public outrage from above died down. If he could manage it, the power vacuum might be filled in smaller, less noticeable increments. More than just the value of a secret cache, the departure of the Sector’s most notorious Bosses could open once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Perhaps, he thought silently, he would earn enough to elevate his status to that of a junior Boss. Maybe then, Boris and his partners would find Slider a different man indeed; a man not to be trifled with. Better yet, he nodded to no one, they would come to understand their mistake in tormenting Ricky Mills. Tomorrow, he thought, a full, three-hour session with Neferure would make for a wonderful celebration. When he felt her touch again, he would stand before her a better man.

  After the crush of mid-day when the crowds at Reese Street Theater began to thin, Ricky slipped once more through that strange gate between the conscious world and another where she waited patiently until Apheru returned. He could hear them beyond the colonnades as he walked, slowing when the voice of Thutmose—clear and unmistakable beyond the delicate curtains—became low and mocking.

  “Does he hold you here? Your stranger; he touches his lips to yours on this very settee?”

  “You know him as well as I,” Neferure answered with a laugh; “his name is as easily drawn from your memory as mine. Has the heat of our desert blunted and sapped your mind so that you cannot recall so simple a word, or do you fear saying it, just as you fear him?”

  “Answer me,” Thutmose ordered.

  “Answer me first!” she replied defiantly, unconcerned for the rage she knew it would bring. “You may hold title and a place as my cousin, but Apheru holds my heart and that is something you will never have!”

  Apheru paused, ready to move should Thutmose go beyond himself, but the rival to Neferure’s hand only returned a laugh of his own.

  “You speak as though the decision has been made, cousin! Perhaps my delay fighting Pharaoh’s enemies where the river reaches the great sea has kept me from important news. Has Pharaoh decided, but forgot somehow to tell her own nephew?”

  “No decision has yet been reached, Thutmose, but her majesty is under no obligation to tell anyone until she ch
ooses—not even her nephew,” said Apheru as he parted the curtains and walked to an oiled teak banquet table to pluck grapes from a bowl. “And yes, I hold the princess here and she holds me; have you not enjoyed a similar gift from concubines in the city? My agents tell me you are with them often enough…”

  Thutmose shook his head with a grin.

  “I wonder if such poisonous words would pour as easily from your mouth in the presence of my Aunt. Would you be as bold before great Senenmut? Perhaps you are brave enough to insult them as you insult me?”

  Apheru tossed a grape to Thutmose and said, “Has speaking the truth suddenly become equivalent to insults, noble warrior? I only answered your question; there was no implied slight to you or Pharaoh. Senenmut does not concern me, but perhaps the word of General Nekhbet should concern you, since your position as a soldier depends on his judgment.”

  “Ah,” Thutmose replied quickly, “that same condition applies as well to you, dear Captain, does it not?”

  “Indeed it does, but my service to the General and my love for Pharaoh are well-known and irrefutable; I do not fear the intrigues of others who cannot tolerate honest debate and the fair measurement of deeds.”

  Apheru watched the anger rising in his adversary, but Thutmose looked away instead, making the small adjustments in his tone that so often paved a way for the darker spirits of his nature to slip through unnoticed. Neferure knew better.

  “Well, Thutmose? What do you say in your defense? Could any argument now sway my heart when clearly it is Apheru I love?”

  “Love?” Thutmose sneered. “How do simple desires matter in the decisions of marriage? Would Pharaoh obviate her duty to the people of Egypt, merely to satisfy a silly girl’s wishes?”

  “Again you underestimate the Princess, Thutmose,” Apheru said with a nod.

  “And she underestimates me,” Thutmose replied quickly, moving close to Neferure. “Your most heated, fearsome passion for this jackal is nothing when balanced against the word of Pharaoh.”