“Fine,” he said, “but don’t make a habit of this, or I’ll tell Theo who stole his bonsai clippers.”
“You wouldn’t,” Whiro said.
“Don’t push it,” Fergus retorted, and slunk back down the hall to his small cabin, his jaw aching from his refusal to give Whiro the satisfaction of seeing him yawn.
* * *
—
Fergus had to admit that nine and half hours of sleep felt miraculously good, even if it did come with guilt over all the things he should have been doing instead, and not a little panic for the yelling-at he knew was waiting for him.
His stomach was stridently insistent on where, in his priority chain, eating needed to go. He headed to the kitchenette, still in his pajama pants, and pressed buttons on the foodmaker until it summoned something sufficiently toroidal to qualify as a bagel, even if it fell short in every other meaningful way.
Then he sat on the grippy couch with the bagel and a mug of coffee, and patiently ate the entire thing before he spoke up. “Whiro, can I have my feed access back now?”
“In a moment,” Whiro said. “I am consulting with the rest of my party. Also, Ignatio and Isla will be joining you shortly. Eat another bagel.”
He did, and was on his second cup of coffee as well when Ignatio came in. “It is interesting news for you that the mass readings across all turnings and orientations in our space are the same as the others,” ey said. “Three is less coincidence now, yes?”
“Yeah,” Fergus said. “So, that means we’re sure there’s thirty-two pieces total?”
“Prettily sure,” Ignatio said. “Also, there is another thing. I did not see, but Whiro’s peripheral data analyses did. The Japan rockslide, the Scotland hill, and Burringurrah, all three places where the live pieces fell, are the same elevation.”
“Burringurrah is over 1100 meters at its peak, and Doune Hill in Scotland is only 700 and something.”
“Yes, but you found the piece near the top of Doune and only partway up Burringurrah. Same height above sea zero.”
“I don’t see how that could mean anything,” Fergus said as Isla came into the kitchen and perched on one arm of the sofa Ignatio was sitting on, stony-faced. That made him feel even worse than if she’d just come in yelling.
As if to emphasize just how much shit he’d gotten himself into, Mister Feefs wandered into the room after her and jumped up on her lap, not his.
“Multidimensional door is about interfaces, yes?” Ignatio said. “Solid rock and easy air are a sharp transition. If the live pieces were drawn to those locations at a specific height, it explains the odd movements of the debris tracks as they came down. We have talked the math and agree.”
“It could be something,” Isla said, petting his cat.
“Does it help us?” Fergus asked.
“It would mean no pieces fell in the ocean,” she said.
Ignatio hummed to emself for a moment, looking back and forth between the two of them, then turned on the table display. “Our map, please, Whiro,” ey said.
The Earth globe outline appeared over the table.
“We have updated our information, operating on the assumption that there are a total of thirty-two live pieces,” Whiro said. “You now have three. We continue to project that the Alliance has eleven and Fajro Promeso has three. We now consider it likely that Digital Midendian has eight, including the one taken in the home invasion in Alaska.”
“That leaves me with seven pieces to find,” Fergus said. “And twenty-two to steal.”
“We still see activity at over forty sites, so it is likely that the others have not yet deduced a total, nor that they have made a correlation to altitude,” Whiro said. “Or they did and later ruled it out, using information we do not have yet, though I consider that highly improbable.”
“So, do we know where the remaining pieces are?” Fergus asked.
“We are confident about five as active sites that should be reasonably accessible to you,” Whiro said, and five dots on the globe changed over to bright green. “The remaining two are less certain, but we are working on it.”
“I’ll need to deal with Digital Midendian and the Alliance, not to mention our cult friends, eventually, but I’d rather avoid all of them until they’re all that’s left.”
“We have some ideas,” Whiro said. “By the time you have more fragments, we may be able to suggest a plan. In the meantime, in your capacity as Finder, you should go Find things while we still have time. Ms. Harcourt has informed us that the two core pieces now in her custody are also showing increased signal output, the last increase coinciding with approximately the time you acquired the new one in Japan.”
“Shit,” Fergus said. “If they’re getting easier for me to find them, then it’s going to eventually get easier for DM to find them. And us.”
“Do not forget, they are louder because they are finding each other,” Ignatio said. Ey frowned. “Maybe they find each other through you? That is also bad. Perhaps you should give them shushes? Sing them a lullaby?”
Isla, miraculously, not quite but almost smiled at that.
“Right,” Fergus said. He stood up. “I’m hungry, I’m cranky, and I need at least a few hours’ peace before I take off again.”
“You don’t think you’re just going to take off again without talking to me, do you?” Isla asked.
“No,” Fergus said. “I think I’m going to take off again while talking to you. Pack what you need. We’re going to”—he leaned in to peer at the green dots on the globe and picked one—“Mongolia. Only if you want, of course.”
* * *
—
The horse was named Gaslan. It was shaggy and small but cantankerous enough for a whole herd of its milder Scottish kin, and had immediately made it known that it did not approve of him.
Isla, sitting quite comfortably atop a dun mare named Saikhan that had already adopted her as its best friend, had similarly made it clear that she had no advice for him, nor sympathy; he hoped her enjoyment of his discomfort and likely future thrown-by-his-horse broken neck would at least count for some small portion of the payback she felt he owed her.
There were ten other people in their birding tour group, dropped on the steppes by shuttle, and their guide, Batu, had singled Fergus out immediately for the obstreperous beast. He didn’t figure him being the only pale, blond-haired (thanks to a new round of nanites applies on his way down from orbit) Western man of the lot was entirely coincidence, but given the long history of behavior by people who looked like him, he didn’t feel he should complain about it.
“We’re going to get along, right, Gaslan?” he told the horse.
One brown fuzzy ear of the horse twitched, as if to flick his words away like a fly. This is going to go great, Fergus thought, just as Gaslan tossed his head and nearly pulled the reins out of Fergus’s hands, and just as nearly made him topple out of the saddle, scrambling to keep his hold.
Isla snickered so loud, half the group turned to ogle him.
As much as he needed the tour to take him out to the shores of Buir Lake, otherwise off-limits as a strict conservation zone, sitting atop the stubby horse made him think he also would not entirely mind if the horse just didn’t move at all.
After seeing the last of the tour group up onto their horses, Batu hopped up onto their own with an ease that almost felt like a personal condemnation. They wore a brightly colored robe and a four-sided hat with a little gold pinnacle, and after giving their pronouns as their sole item of self-introduction, had made it clear that no one was allowed to touch their hat, ever, and not even to ask.
Fergus was glad Ignatio wasn’t along to defy that edict.
Batu gave a whoop, and the horses all fell into line and followed them across the grass, Gaslan very last and not at all happy about it, if the two or three side steps that nearly knocked Ferg
us off his back were any indication. When that failed, his horse broke into a sudden trot, which was like getting crotch-punched by a battering ram. Gaslan nearly ran down the three other people in front of him, all of whom gave him dirty looks, before Batu looked over their shoulder, barked something, and Gaslan let himself drift again toward the back of the line with surly resignation.
I’m going to die, Fergus thought, whimpering, as Isla slowed her horse with precision and ease to come back alongside him.
Other than abject fear of his horse, the sun was out and the day was beautiful. The grass was an ocean of green and tan, so flat the gentle wind left distinct waves in it as it passed. Ahead of them he could just make out the blue line on the horizon that was a distant lake, and the sun in the enormous, cloudless sky glinted off the tiny white dots of birds that were, ostensibly at least, their reason for coming.
It still seemed wrong, after all his hiking so far, that seven hundred meters above sea level was the low point there. For all the strength of a late-spring sun ready to bloom into summer, the air was cool, and if the breeze had been stronger, it would have felt borderline chilly. The land seemed untouched by time, though he knew it had been just as ravaged by climate change as much of the rest of the world; Mongolia had adopted stringent environmental policies after drought and increasingly devastating storms in the twenty-second century had wiped out most of its existing agriculture for decades and left the population on the brink of starvation.
Part of the legacy of their lifesaving land-management policies were places like this, cut off from all but the most impactless technology. Certainly not somewhere anyone could bring a van, and no one was hauling a parabolic dish there on the back of Gaslan.
Isla coughed meaningfully. “So?” she asked.
The line of horses was strung out enough that they were not likely to be overheard by the nearest rider ahead of them, who was anyway deeply in conversation with someone else.
“So,” Fergus said. “I’m sorry I snuck out and went to Japan without you. It was the wrong thing to do, and I know it. I am not, however, sure I was wrong to send you back to the motel in Australia. In fact, I’m still convinced I wasn’t, but I got some surprisingly decent advice from the world’s least self-aware man, and I see it’s not about convincing myself but convincing you.”
“Great. So, convince me,” she said.
He shrugged. “It was getting dangerous. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
She waited, eyes on him as they trailed along at the end of the horse line, and finally emitted a sound that was half-growl, half-laugh. “That’s it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, do you really think I wouldn’t or shouldn’t care if something bad happened to you?”
“That’s not it,” she said. “The person that gave ye this ‘decent’ advice, do they know how to get along with anybody?”
“Not really, no,” Fergus said. “I was desperate. But look . . . when I was a little kid? I think Ma believed that, with me helping her, we could somehow pull Old Scotland up from centuries ago and make it somehow live again. And of course we couldn’t, and when I started to realize that, it was like I’d betrayed some fundamental trust. And then when Da killed himself right in front of me, and I couldn’t reach him . . . So, I ran away. All the way to Mars, to escape feeling responsible, feeling I failed them both.”
“I know all this,” she said.
“Then on Mars, I met Dru,” he said, and was silent for a while, trying to find words for the heartache he’d carried around wordlessly for nearly two decades. Isla rode along, and said nothing, giving him time.
A drone passed in the distance, and he reflexively hunkered down against his horse, but it did not come near enough to be obvious trouble.
“Remember when we were talking about Sentinel?” he asked at last. “Dru was the first person I met on Mars, maybe the first friend I’d ever made, and she introduced me to Kaice and the Free Marsies, and that’s how I ended up on the Sentinel raid. I’d have done anything for her, and my whole life since then has been largely because of her.”
“Were you in love with her?”
Fergus laughed and shook his head. “That’s hard to say,” he said. “I was in love with our friendship, and her passion and optimism, and that when she looked at me, she saw new potential, not old disappointment. I was still really a kid, and even though she wasn’t that much older than me, she seemed like she knew everything and everyone, and was invincible and happy in a way I never imagined anyone could be, and I was feeling free for the first time in my life. And it didn’t last, and I’ve never been free again since.”
“She broke your heart?”
“No. Mars broke hers,” he said. “Well, the MCA did. After the Sentinel raid, they rounded up anybody who even looked like they might have Marsie sympathies. They got her. They didn’t get me. Eventually, they let everyone go again, but not until they’d broken them all, one by one, however long that took. And it took them a long time, with her.”
“That’s not your fault,” Isla said.
“No, maybe not,” he said. “But . . . the light in her eyes was gone; the passion had become all-consuming terror. And I felt guilty that it hadn’t been me they’d taken instead, because I already knew all about the darkness. And I felt guilty because then I ran away again, always trying to stay one step ahead of losing anyone else. I was pretty good at that for a long time, until I started making friends despite myself—believe me, I have no idea what any of them see in me—and then . . . well, you. All the guilt that I carry around, if something happened to you, it would finally be enough break me.”
“Ever since I was old enough for Gavin and my aunt and uncle to talk about you, and Gavin started showing me the Suttie’s receipts coming in from all over the galaxy, I dreamed about going off on adventures with you,” Isla said. “I imagined fast spaceships and weird but friendly aliens—”
“There’s Ignatio,” Fergus said.
She laughed. “Yeah. Exactly like that, except Ignatio almost seems too silly to be real.”
Fergus chuckled. “You should tell em that. I think ey’d be flattered.”
“But anyway, there were raids on space castles and a lot of rescuing alien princesses when I was younger, and then as I got older, it was about seeing nebulas and star nurseries and flying through Saturn’s rings, and maybe still a few space castles. The life of adventure, you know?”
“I know,” Fergus said. “I’ve never met an alien princess, but I’ve definitely been in a few things that almost could count as space castles. Certainly space dungeons. And I’ve had a lot of fun. But I’ve also been in abandoned habs full of dead children, and broken my ribs in landslides that I wasn’t sure I could dig myself out of before I ran out of air, and been stabbed and burned and tortured, and blown out airlocks, and . . . a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have survived, except I’m just too bloody-minded to give up and die. People around me have died. And those are just as much of my stories too, except I don’t tell that part.”
Isla nodded soberly and was quiet, lost in her own thoughts.
The target area for the debris was ahead, before the actual lakeshore. The group rode in at a leisurely pace, only loosely keeping to the path worn through the grass, and as everyone pointed and talked in at least four different languages, Fergus kept his eyes on the sky, where both bird and drone had wheeled, and did his best to calm his breathing and focus, listening with that alien sense deep within.
He wished he dared close his eyes, but he felt like Gaslan was just waiting for him to relax and become inattentive to do something awful to him. Pinned to his collar, his translation device murmured conversation to him, with a slight lag from the people speaking around him. Someone had spotted something called a ‘greeb,’ and there was much pointing and exclamation from the front of the group. The poor bird—a duck of some sort, he thought from the p
rofile—took off in alarm for the open waters of the lake, where most of its fellows had wisely resettled when they saw the horses coming.
Batu stopped them a ways from the shore and pointed out a herd of small antelope farther down the shore. “Zeer,” the guide informed them. A woman whose horse had stopped near Fergus’s own smiled at him and said something his translator did not catch, so he just smiled broadly and enthusiastically back at her.
After a few minutes’ pause, their guide got them moving again. Around him he could feel the steppe as some great, calm, empty space free of the constant buzz and tingle of electricity, free of the technology of humanity. His fellow birdwatchers were each a bright noise, with their cameras and handpads and other recorders, trying to catch the blur of a bird as it wheeled overhead and raced away. “Kestrel,” someone said, and it certainly looked much like the kestrels back home in Scotland.
Something nagged at him, some tiny spark tapping on his attention, and he studied the grass to the west of the trail, attempting to focus on what lay out there. Isla followed his gaze, trying to see what he saw, but it was only a feeling. Another drone appeared overhead, this one closer, and sent a huge flock of gulls up into the air. Batu stopped the group again, annoyed. “Not again!” the translator caught. They turned in their saddle back to them. “This is not one of yours?” they asked, and as everyone’s translator caught up, everyone in the group shook their heads. They were as unhappy about the flock being spooked as the guide was.
Batu spoke briefly into their radio, then urged them all to dismount. They hauled down one of their saddlebags and handed out small packets of snacks. Fergus took his and found inside some thick, dry cookies and a handful of thin carrot sticks.
He held one up and caught Isla’s gaze. “Noo, lass, we kin gang catch us aw wee sheep!” he said, and she threw one of her own carrot sticks at his head.
Fergus heard the soft, muffled chime of a handpad and pulled his out of his bag, but it wasn’t his. He looked over at Isla. “That you?” he asked.
The Scavenger Door Page 21