“I suppose you don’t,” Fergus said. “After we get back to shore, if you want to take an auto-taxi over and go ring his bell, we can.”
“Why?” Peter asked.
Good question, Fergus thought. He needed to come there anyway, eventually—he was certain the fragments that the cult had collected had to be there rather than in the bogus temple in Kansas—but having Peter along was a significant inconvenience.
“In my life,” he said, “I’ve been in bad places I wasn’t sure I’d ever get out of. I’ve been beaten down, tortured, and nearly killed, more times than I can count. But I always knew why I was there and what I was fighting for. Who I was fighting for. And I may think your desire to see everything and everyone end in flame is incredibly tragic and wrong, but at the very fucking least, you deserve to know the real man trying to lead you there.”
Peter turned back to the railing and stared out over the water, and said nothing else. Fergus left him alone and instead watched the precision with which the drought buoys fell back into position after the disruption of the boat’s passing, and thought about how comforting—and dull—the illusion of an orderly universe could be.
Anyway, while Peter had gotten his eyeful of Granby’s very un-transcendent mansion, Fergus had gotten at least a preliminary feel for the security drones, bordering estates, and walls in between. And if he was interpreting the expression on Peter’s face correctly, he was going to get a chance to check it out from the front gate, too.
You didn’t bring him along to be bait, he reminded himself.
“I want to go speak to him,” Peter said, on cue.
“You sure about that?”
“If you’re lying, I want to know. If you’re not . . .” Peter trailed off, staring down at his feet for a while, before he added, “I just need to do this.”
“Okay,” Fergus said. After the tour ended, they caught one of the line of auto-taxis that had just dropped off tourists for the next outing and were waiting idle for their next client. Fergus was pretty sure they screened for unauthorized people trying to go directly to certain private estates, possibly including notifying the resident, but ogling ridiculously expensive neighborhoods was the prime tourism draw there in the summer other than the lake itself, and there was only so much courtesy you could let get in the way of profit. “We want to go see some fancy homes,” Fergus told the auto-taxi system. “Can we drive around up on Sandy Cove Hill, please? Also, please set to full window tint.”
Obediently, the auto-taxi pulled away from the boat dock and headed north as the windows darkened slightly. From outside, they’d be virtually opaque and probably displaying advertising.
His handpad pinged and he checked it, keeping it turned away from Peter, who was studiously looking out the window. It was a message from Zacker, who had picked up his “package” he’d left in a shuttleport locker in Portland and felt very abused for having been sent on an errand all the way to the Atlantic States in order to pick up a can of soda, and Martian soda at that. Fergus had been planning to bring his latest find back up to orbit, but with Whiro still off shaking interest and his own change of plans, he didn’t dare carry it on his person. Not directly into the home territory of one of his enemies.
Thanks, he sent back. Hang on to it until I’m back in touch. Don’t open it, no matter what.
The area heading up toward Sandy Cove was heavily forested. Unlike Newfoundland, where the pines were short and scrappy, as if daring you to fight, here they soared tall as if born with an expectation of unchallenged dominance.
So did the people living among them, Fergus considered, as they turned up the winding road through the billionaire estates. Many of the homes looked like log cabins Dunning-Kruger’d to the scale and grandeur of palaces: thick wooden structures with soaring windows just visible behind heavy ornate gates and through carefully manicured, curated, domesticated forest. Others were more faux-Victorian fare, and a few oddballs like an orange concrete brutalist revival that even Peter made a face over, a few stonework castles including one that was designed to look like an old-fashioned river mill except the stones were shiny crystal and the waterwheel was a giant, gold-colored cog. Barrett Granby’s house, by comparison, was relatively conservative in affect, a massive, shallow-roofed stone home with an almost Southwestern sensibility, behind bronze gates embellished with the same flame motif as on the medal imbedded in Peter’s chest.
Peter let out a long, resigned sigh when he noticed that. “Can we stop?” he asked the auto-taxi.
It dutifully pulled over to the shoulder and Peter got out. The man took off his puffin sweatshirt, threw it in the back seat, and walked toward the gate in his linens, still stained and crusty with his own blood.
Fergus stayed in the taxi, not wanting to risk getting his face on camera, and because he could safely and anonymously scrutinize the entrance for security from within. And anyway, he thought it likely that Peter wanted to do this alone—he himself would. As long as no one attacked the man and dragged him inside against his will, this was Peter’s time, not his.
Peter stopped twice in the road while crossing to the gates, his hands fluttering at his sides in agitation. He kept glancing back as if unsure he was doing the right thing. It was the appearance of another autocar, coming around the curve and toward them, that finally made him decide and scurry the rest of the way across.
Standing before the tall gates, Peter ran his fingers around one of the stylized frames, then stepped to the side and pressed the bell. It took a while for a human response, but the technological one was immediate. Fergus felt a network of sensors and cameras wake up all around the gate, could feel the distant buzz of microdrones like moth-wing flutters against his senses and, to his surprise, something under Peter’s feet, radiating wakefulness where moments before there had been nothing.
Eight minutes later, a man appeared at the gate. He was wearing a black suit, not linen like Peter’s, and was very certainly better fed, from the size of his muscles. He was also, from the bulge of his jacket against his thigh, armed. The gate opened just wide enough for the guard to step into and fill the gap.
“Fratro,” Peter said.
“Don’t ‘brother’ me; what do you want?” the guard demanded.
“I would like to see the Mastro, to pray at his feet,” Peter answered. “I have come a long way to show my devotion and faithfulness.”
“Show me your Pledge,” the guard said.
Peter pulled his tunic off awkwardly over his head. The bruises and welts and a lifetime of starvation written across his body were hard to witness. “Oh, ouch,” Fergus murmured under his breath.
The guard reached out, and Fergus couldn’t see but assumed he’d touched the emblem embedded in Peter’s chest, to make sure it was real. “Put your shirt on. Wait here,” the guard said, and stepped back inside. The gate closed again.
It was forty minutes before the guard came back. Peter had stood there the whole time, not moving except to put his shirt back on as instructed. “The Mastro is busy in his devotions, beseeching the Unholy Fire to fulfill its promise and cleanse the world, and cannot be disturbed,” the guard said. It sounded like a practiced script. “He sends you a token of his love for you, his filo de fajro, and asks you to carry on the great work.”
The guard set something in Peter’s hands. Whatever Peter said, it was low enough that Fergus couldn’t hear, but the guard seemed satisfied by it. He made some hand gesture that Peter returned, then crossed back through the gates, which closed immediately behind him once again.
Peter came back to the car, got in, and sat there like stone, his hands cupped around whatever the guard had given him.
“Are you okay?” Fergus asked, after a while.
“Sure,” Peter said. He looked like he might cry, or shout, and was stuck in limbo between the two. “It’s fine. The Mastro was busy.”
“Look—” Fe
rgus started.
Peter turned his face to look back out the window. “And that is, as you said, the Mastro’s house,” he said.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, I—”
“Don’t,” Peter said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t apologize,” Peter said. “Can we go?”
“Sure,” Fergus said. He instructed the auto-taxi to continue, and it pulled off the shoulder smoothly back into the travel lane and continued its long loop up and around Sandy Cove, past more castles and lodges and towers, until they wound back down and Fergus told it to take them into Carson City.
It dropped them off twenty minutes later at a central transportation hub. After checking that nothing had followed them down from the hills, Fergus gently herded Peter into a small, brightly colored cafeteria and got tea and half a croissant into him before Peter pushed the remainder away and set the object, still clutched in one fist, down on the table. It was a coin, much like the medal in Peter’s chest, except gold. Or gold-covered, at least. It also radiated a faint trace of electricity, though Fergus couldn’t tell what it was.
“Riches are for those who burn,” Peter said. Reluctantly, he picked it up again and put it quickly into a pocket. Then he pulled his puffin sweatshirt back on, shivering from something more than the cafeteria’s air conditioning.
“Where do you want to go?” Fergus asked, after the silence had stretched on long enough to be awkward. “There’s a bus stop here and a train. Anywhere you want to go, I’ll buy you a ticket.”
“Kansas?” Peter said.
“If that’s what you want,” Fergus answered.
“Kansas, then.”
Fergus went with him to the train station, got him a ticket, and handed him a bag with another croissant in it. “For the trip,” he said. “Humor me and take it, okay?”
Peter nodded, then turned and got on board. Fergus watched the train pull out of the station, his feelings a volatile mix of pity and anger, relief and calculation. Okay, he told himself. You helped him. Now get back to the job.
He caught another auto-taxi farther into the city to pick up supplies and find a hotel. His body clock was still woefully off, and he was going to have a busy day tomorrow.
* * *
—
In the morning, he arrived bright and early on the same docks as the tour boat, for a beginner scuba diving lesson. After a quick but exhaustive lecture on the physics at play and the physiological experience, the instructor and her assistant got their six students suited up—in this, Fergus’s years of experience with exosuits gave him an edge and a small but satisfying nod of approval—and then walked them through all their safety equipment, quizzing them on emergency scenarios that were apparently too much for one middle-aged man, who peeled off his loaner suit and bowed out.
Then they were herded down to the water, like the universe’s most awkward herd of ugly ducklings, and let go as deep as their waists before making them all practice their breathing until they could demonstrate competence. Another student was sent back to shore with the assistant for some extra one-on-one, and the instructor took the remainder of their brave flock out as far as shoulder depth and set them to the task of completing a circle around her underwater.
Fergus’s student diving mask gave gentle feedback and information in his ear, reminding him of his current depth and restrictions on the distance he was allowed to stray from the instructor, and overall, it wasn’t as terrifying as he’d worried. Of course, he was never more than a meter away from air or unable to stand up and wade back to shore.
They spent about three hours in the water and were given a discount code for intermediary lessons if they wanted, and then relieved of all their gear and herded into the dive shop on their way out.
Still playing the enthusiastic tourist, Fergus dropped a cringeworthy amount of credit on a full set of gear, including the top-of-the-line smartmask, an air-release diffuser, and a waterproof duffel bag, before loading it all up in another auto-taxi to haul back to his hotel and dump on the floor while he took a long, anxiety-filled nap in a bed too soft to feel like the safety of solid ground.
He woke up in late afternoon, the sun still dominating the sky above the mountains to the west, and set about carefully checking through all his gear and purchases one last time. He packed it all along with his toolkit, ball bearings, and slingshot into the waterproof duffel and sealed it up. With nothing else to do except wait for dark, he bounced a call through his encrypted channel to Mars.
“Where in hell are ye?” Isla asked, right away. She seemed to be sitting in a small AV space, and her color looked much better than when he’d left her.
“Nevada,” he said.
“Isn’t Nevada radioactive?”
“Only Las Vegas,” Fergus replied. “I had a sudden change of plans and decided to go for the Fajro Promeso pieces sooner rather than later.”
“Did ye get the Newfoundland piece?” she asked.
“Yeah. I left it in a locker in Portland, in the Atlantic States, and sent my friend Zacker after it. Wow, did I get an earful about making him get off his ass and cross borders just to fetch a can of soda.” Fergus smiled at the thought. “Anyway, didn’t want it on my person here, and thought that was as safe a place as any in a pinch. How are you doing?”
“Better enough to be bored,” she said. “Although not too bored, because apparently word has got around that Famous Fergus’s sister is here, and I’ve got Marsies coming from all over to say hello. It’s very awkward, especially when I need to nap. I get tired so easily.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t—”
“No,” she interrupted. “It’s cool to see how much ye’ve made a difference. So, what happened with the pieces that got stuck together?”
“They got stuck together,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “No, I mean, how did ye get them apart? Kaice told me.”
“I followed your suggestion, O Smart Sister of Mine, and tried talking to them. Or rather, I tried to make them sleepy. I don’t know what I did or how, but it worked. Once, anyway.”
She pursed her lips, thinking. “I had an idea about that,” she said. “Let me get back to ye. Oh! Arelyn is here. We have a lunch date. Later, Fergus.” She reached out and disconnected.
See, she’s okay, he told himself.
Fergus ate a vending-machine sandwich in silence, forcing his thoughts back around to the present day. When dusk had finally given over to dark, he caught another auto-taxi out to a small public park, now empty of everything except mosquitoes, and headed along the well-worn path toward the small beach.
Setting his stuff down on a rock by the water’s edge, he took off his shorts and shirt and pulled his diving suit on over the black bodysuit he’d had on underneath his regular clothes. He tied up his clothes in a black bag and tucked them deep under cover of some bushes, determined that he would be back for them, and not least because his Dingo Hole T-shirt was in there and he wasn’t ready to lose it yet.
The duffel strapped neatly across his back below the shoulder-blade unit that drew oxygen out of the water for his regulator without being much of an encumbrance. He then attached a much smaller, waterproof pouch to his chest and filled it with things he might need quickly.
At the water’s edge, he pulled his flippers on and the very expensive mask with the zoom and infrared features down over his face. Last thing he picked up was a small submersible handjet, and then he flapped his way as quietly as he could into the water until he was deep enough to squat down and slip forward horizontally and under.
It was about three and half kilometers, cutting straight between curves of the lakeshore, to where the Sandy Cove estates began. For now, he just needed to stay under and let the jet pull him forward, deep enough below the surface to leave no wake or sound, and keep all his senses out for anything un-lake-like in his path. Th
e nearly full moon over the open lake dappled the water around him with the shadows of the drought buoys and occasionally caught, faintly, the flash of a fish darting out of his path and away.
He passed about three meters below a canoe without ever being noticed; the diffuser he’d bought made sure no bubbles bigger than fizz on a soda reached the surface.
The private security sensors around Granby’s dock and personal beach were floaters, not much different in size from the drought buoys, and arrayed along their fringes to blend in. Visually, they probably did so very well, but to Fergus’s senses they were loud. They also, Fergus thought as he slid silently past them from below, were doing a very excellent job of watching for intruders coming in along the lake surface but not below it.
It wasn’t until he neared the dock itself that there was any kind of underwater security, and that was a simple pair of forward-facing sensors attached to the outermost dock pilings about a meter and half down. They were easy enough to avoid by skirting the dock toward the beach, then angling back toward and under the dock behind them.
The boathouse was attached to the dock, and he swam from the cover of the latter quickly around and into the nearer of two boat bays, currently unoccupied. Popping his head out of water still concealed beneath a perimeter walkway inside the boathouse, he pulled his swim fins off—appreciating them far more now that he wasn’t trying to walk in them—and then took off his mask and breathing gear. Bundling them together in a string bag he’d brought along in his front pouch, he used a wad of StickAnywhere to attach the bag by its drawstrings to the underside of the walkway planks. The lumpy adhesive should last for up to a week, by which time he’d either have escaped via some other route or was dead and didn’t need his fins anyway.
Peering up, he could see sensors in the eaves, but they were pointed toward the wide boat door. The smaller entrance from the boathouse out onto the dock was alarmed but not watched, at least not from inside. He slipped quietly along the underside of the walkway, until he was at the back of the boathouse closest to shore and well out of the view of the eave sensors, then slid his duffel out of the water and pulled himself up after it onto the slick wood planks above. There was no noticeable change in the signal notes around him, so it seemed likely he hadn’t been detected.
The Scavenger Door Page 30