Fergus lazily turned his coffee mug around in front of him, back and forth, knowing all too well he couldn’t trust it was safe to drink. It smelled so good, though, that twice he nearly found himself raising it to his lips. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “First, I’m kind of an asshole. Bad social skills, doesn’t play well with others, not a team player. You know the type. A human resources nightmare, frankly. And I smell like goats. For your own sake, I must turn you down.”
“That’s surprisingly glib, for someone with as much risk as you,” Derecho said.
“I get that glib thing a lot,” Fergus said, letting the risk comment pass. “But, if you want a serious answer, it’s this: those pieces? You can’t harness the technology, not if you had decades to study them, and you don’t. They’re a ticking time bomb, the count is running down, and there’s no way to turn them off. The best you could hope for is to be one of the first to die so you won’t have to witness as it consumes our entire planet, our entire solar system, and with it your entire potential customer base.”
“I’m not interested in any scare-story bullshit,” Derecho said. “Everything can be understood and controlled. And even if what you said is true, how could you possibly know any of this?”
“Because I can hear them, the monsters waiting for us,” Fergus said. “Can’t you?”
“Hear them? Hear who?” Derecho repeated.
Fergus raised both his hands, palms facing each other. Mitch and Kyle both stiffened, ready in a second to jump in. “May I?” Fergus asked.
“Do what?” Derecho asked suspiciously.
“Let you hear them, too,” Fergus said.
There was a long pause, then Derecho nodded. “Sure.”
Fergus placed both his hands on either side of Derecho’s head, covering his ears, and let the core fragments still in his pack wake up and connect to him, and then through him to the opposite ends of the path. The skittering, oily, pinch-bite feel of the Vraet slithered through Fergus’s body, through his hands, and Derecho jerked away, his face pale.
“How the hell did you do that?”
“Not me. The pieces,” Fergus said. “That’s what’s coming for us all.”
“Boss?” Kyle asked.
Derecho waved a hand for him to shut up and sat there for a long minute, recomposing himself, before he took a shaking sip of his coffee. When he set the mug down, it was more confidently. “It’s a trick,” he said. “A good trick, worthy of the best con men, but only a trick.”
“What if it’s not?” Fergus said.
“I can’t accept that possibility,” he said. “So: there’s a job offer on the table.”
“I must decline, but thanks,” Fergus said. “I’d like to leave now.”
“Not yet. Negotiations, right? Since offering you a job wasn’t good enough, how about I offer you your life, safety, and freedom?”
“You planning on killing me here?” Fergus asked.
“Not me. I can’t vouch for Mitch. But you know, I had access to an awful lot of the Alliance’s secret data, not just the stuff I was contracted to manage and/or purge but other stuff, too. And it’s interesting that I found this chunk of bioprint data—woefully incomplete, but enough to speculate with, that seems to be a nice match for you. Our Monkeywrench seems to be one Duncan MacInnis, and oooh boy, does the Alliance want to get their hands on you. There are layers there, you know, a lot of good people at the top doing all the day-to-day good stuff, but then pockets of people below them, doing the dirtier or less publicly palatable things also for the greater good, or how they perceive it anyway, and your name is all over their files. Handing them you would likely buy me a lot of forgiveness.”
“What, some random speculation with no proof? I doubt it,” Fergus said.
“I got the Enceladus connection, and I can draw a line between that dot over to the Shipyard at Pluto and your friends there. Interesting that you’re here and one of their ships has been intermittently parked here in orbit almost the whole time. If that’s enough to interest them, what other data will they give me? How many dots can I connect until I have a drawing of your whole life?” Derecho said. “As you said, you’re an asshole and you don’t play well with others, particularly when those others are in positions of authority. I bet I could find a lot of people looking for you.”
“What if you can’t?” Fergus said.
“I can. More to your point, what is it worth to you to keep those dots nicely unconnected, unfollowable? Data is my thing. I mean, given how much digging I had to do to connect you to Enceladus, you’ve got some skills there, but I’m the master at it, and I’m trusted. Well, was trusted, but I will be again. I could hide you from them, give you a whole new life where you won’t have to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when the law is going to catch up to you.”
“There are fifty-two billion people in this solar system,” Fergus said. “Even you must have one person you’d give up everything for to see survive.”
“You are making several faulty assumptions,” Derecho said. “First, that I believe your disaster scenario at all, and second, that even if I did, that even though you see no solution to it, that I would be unable to find one. You think I am either gullible or stupid, and it doesn’t matter which, because I am neither.”
“Well, then,” Fergus said. “I’m sorry, but I think we’re at an impasse.”
“I’m sorry too,” Derecho said. “I’d like to say I’m a gentleman and I’ll give you an hour’s head start or something, but really, I’m not. I’ve already made sure the Alliance finds all my datapoints on you, with connections handily drawn in for all to see. Also, as soon as I get back to Earth, I’m going to put a bounty on your head big enough that your own mother would turn you in for it. Between me and the Alliance, you’re never going to have a day of peace for the rest of your life.”
“Haven’t had one yet, so I guess I won’t know what I’m missing,” Fergus said, standing up.
“Once you’re out that door, it’ll be too late,” Derecho said. “Right now, I could stop it all. Be sure this is what you want.”
Fergus laughed. “What I want? I wish that figured into any of this. Thanks for the offer, though.”
“Wrong decision, MacInnis,” Derecho said sadly.
Past him, Mitch cracked his knuckles. “I’m okay with it,” he said.
“Mitch? Consider that the last time we met, I left you unharmed,” Fergus said. “If you get in my way again, I’m going to put you out an airlock.”
He popped a blister pack of cleaner bots and dropped it behind him as he strode out the door without looking back.
* * *
—
“You cannot reach me,” Whiro replied to his query, after a nerve-wracking lag. “I have departed Earth and am currently in the jump queue at Jupiter to get back to the Shipyard. I am being followed by Blue Ivory and watched by at least three other vessels in my current vicinity.”
“What?” Fergus said. “You left me?”
“All orbiting and outgoing ships are being searched, and we were concerned that if the Alliance failed to turn up anything of note on their first pass through, that would become a lockdown. Ignatio insisted we depart, as eir mobility is necessary to finish your task.”
“Isla?”
“She went directly to Mars with the Baltimore fragments, because we were about to be searched. The Alliance seemed particularly nonplussed to find only an alien—and one they could not identify—onboard, and their attempts to get coherent answers out of em seemed unusually fraught with language difficulties.”
“Good for Ignatio,” Fergus said. He was holed up, sitting on the floor in a maintenance closet on the underbelly of the station with his handpad resting on his crossed legs, passively tapped in to the orbital security cameras. Derecho had left, and so far, no one was heading in his direction, but more All
iance personnel were arriving all the time, and there seemed to be a coordinated sweep being organized a few floors away from him. Before long, he would be found.
It was a good thing no one had a dog, or they’d have sniffed his goaty self out in thirty seconds.
“If I can somehow get directly to Mars on my own—” he said.
“It would be inadvisable to try,” Whiro said. “The Alliance has already involved the Mars Colonial Authority. According to Arelyn, the MCA has become unusually active and is searching everyone moving in and out of Free Marsie territory, and there has been an upsurge in raids just over the last few hours.”
“Shit,” Fergus said. “Is everyone down there safe?”
“Arelyn checked in with me a few hours ago, and at that time, everyone was fine and in a secure location. You, on the other hand, present a difficulty in that regard.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Fergus said. “I’ve got eight fragments sitting in my backpack, trying to convince me to become one of them, and twenty-four others down on Mars I need to retrieve, and I’m trapped.”
“Ignatio is telling me at this time that he is arranging for a third-party ride. Arelyn and Kaice have identified a Martian courier who will rendezvous with you. Please hold tight where you are until details are finalized.”
“But—”
“There are no buts,” Whiro said. “Wait.”
“Fine,” Fergus said, and disconnected. He considered kicking the closet wall out of frustration, but with his luck, someone would hear and come arrest him and he’d have no one to blame except his own petulant self. “But I’m the plan-maker,” he muttered to himself instead, and it didn’t make him feel nearly as better as kicking the wall would have.
His handpad chimed again. He tapped it, and Arelyn’s face appeared. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Sitting in a closet on Kelly Station, in Earth orbit,” he said. “Might be here for a while, because my ship abandoned me. It’s not bad, though. Some fresh paint, maybe a nice picture or two—”
“Whatever,” Arelyn said. “You need to get yourself off that station.”
“Trust me, I’m trying,” Fergus said. “All the outbound ships are being searched—”
“Off the station doesn’t require in something else,” Arelyn said, and she had a genuinely pleased grin on her face. “You got your suit?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Great. I’m sending you a specific low-frequency code that’s an old Free Marsie mining transport call. Get yourself at least a kilometer and a half off the station, wait until exactly one hour from now, then activate that code. Your ride from Ignatio will pick you up, then swing out to meet Isla and our courier with the fragments.”
“The Alliance isn’t going to let any ship out of this territory without being searched,” Fergus said.
Arelyn smiled again. “They won’t search Ignatio’s friends.”
“Then who—” Fergus started to ask.
Arelyn just shook her head. “Oh, that would be telling,” she said. “One hour on the dot. Don’t be late. I wish I could be there just to see the look on your face.”
* * *
—
Fergus had been out into space more times than he could count, more places than he could count. Some of those times had been fun, and other times it was because someone was trying to kill him, and some had been for short stretches and others for long, but he hated, hated, hated throwing himself out a perfectly good airlock without at least some idea where he was going, how he was going to get there, and most important of all, how he was going to get back.
Also, he hated that it was someone else’s plan, even if it was people he trusted with his life, because dammit, plans were his job.
As soon as he’d closed the external airlock and made sure it sealed—he’d had to short the alarm systems, and he didn’t want to be the cause of some hapless maintenance person opening the inside door and accidentally sucking themself out into space—he turned around and looked out on his home world.
It was night, Earthside. He’d seen old vids talking to early spacewalkers, talking about being engulfed in darkness, but that had been centuries and centuries before. Below him through clouds he could see the lights of cities defining the land, see the pale glow of drought kites over the horn of Africa, and all around and below were the brightly colored fireflies of all the ships, coming and going, wandering, spinning along with the planet below. So much life, he thought. It was dizzying.
He carefully pushed himself upright, magboots against the station hull, and stood there sideways, looking around, but there was no one and nothing particularly near him or likely to cut across his path. Here goes, he thought, and turned off the magnets in his boots just as he kicked himself off.
Space was funny in that it just didn’t really ever make you slow down. As soon as you headed off in one direction, unless you hit something else or some other force came along and applied friction or resistance on you, you just kept floating along in whatever direction you had started going. Newton’s Third Law was, in this moment, his friend. Also, the pocket full of zero-gravity toilet disinfectant bombs he’d grabbed on his way out of the closet. It was only a shame, he thought as he very carefully aimed each pitch to moderate his trajectory, that the faint puffs of pink dust each one gave out when it hit the station couldn’t do anything about the righteously bad funk he was sure the interior of his exosuit was rapidly acquiring from his be-goated clothes.
He did, however, speed up a little with each throw.
When he was sure he was far enough away from the station, and his time had run out, he activated the code Arelyn had sent him on the old frequency, and waited and watched as he kept drifting farther out.
Along the horizon, in orbit above the flecks and blooms of a distant terrestrial thunderstorm, was the Alliance station itself. As he watched, a dot detached itself from the larger mass of lights and pulled away from the station.
Shit, Fergus thought. Don’t come this way. I’m out of toilet bombs.
It turned and headed directly toward him. His suit jets wouldn’t do much to escape it, and once he lit them up, he was going to be a lot more visible to anyone else looking for him. So, he waited, willing it to turn, or ascend, or descend, or something.
As it got closer, it became increasingly clear that it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a human ship. It looked like a fat-limbed anemone, resplendent with moving, twinkling lights, and as it approached, its limbs extended and spread, as if it was opening its jaws to swallow him whole.
Help? he thought.
Fergus was engulfed, drawn in, and deposited very, very gently in a circular chamber as the ship sealed behind him. Several rope-like structures ran from floor to ceiling, and he grabbed desperately at one as the ship suddenly accelerated, sending him swinging. Whatever the floor was made of, his boots did not want to stick to it, so he clung there until the ship’s speed leveled off again and another door opened onto the interior. Two aliens came through.
He knew those wrinkly squash shapes only too well: Ponkians. The last time he’d met one was under the ice of Enceladus, working in one of the research stations, and it was almost as much a surprise then as now. Fergus opened his faceplate and grinned, bowing low. “Estimables!” he said. “Thank you for the lift!”
One of the Ponkians grinned back at him. “Welcome, welcome, mmmmmm, friend!” one said.
“Estimable Feffi?” Fergus asked.
“Ah, I am I!” Feffi said. Fergus had met Feffi nearly a decade earlier, in a Ganymede bar named the Riot, moments before it lived up to its name; he’d got the Ponkian safely out before it could be harmed or, worse, get distressed enough to inflate and blow foul gas throughout the land hab. Ponkians were pleasant, jovial, agreeable people except when anxious or afraid, at which point they could also be described as a near-perfect cross between
a pufferfish and a skunk.
Feffi and the other Ponkian, Tugu, showed him to a small cabin, where he pulled off his exosuit and hung it up, hoping to air it out. “Are you distressed?” Feffi asked.
“No, no, thank you, I’m very happy,” Fergus said.
Tugu’s entire face scrunched up in thick wrinkles. “Mmmmm but scared? Worried? Hurt?”
“No, no, really, I . . .” Fergus started to protest again, then realized why they were asking. “It’s not me. It was goats.”
“Mmmmm goats?” Feffi asked.
“I was sitting with them for a long time,” Fergus said. Should he say the goats smelled bad, or would that cause offense? He didn’t know how Ponkians regarded their own odor. “They may have been worried. Do you have a way I can wash?”
“Yes, yes!” Tugu said, relieved, and showed him a sliding panel that opened on a small closet, and reached out one long, skinny purple limb to tap a panel. Thin jets of water sprayed out from a grid of holes on one wall, and then got sucked into similar holes on the opposite one. “Very nice, mmmmmm?”
Tugu turned the water off, then Feffi very gently nudged Fergus inside, and they closed the door. It was certainly a broad hint. He took off his clothes, snuck them back out the door onto the floor, and then enjoyed the sharp, warm water as long as he dared.
The cabin was empty when he emerged, and as he stepped over the small threshold between shower and room, a wall of hot, fresh air hit him from both sides. He stopped there until he felt dry, thinking about how he’d never given sufficient consideration to the possibility of signing on to a Ponkian exploration ship before, though their idea of exploration was more one of “wander around the galaxy at random and eat food.”
It wasn’t a bad life at all, he decided, as he pulled a clean change of clothes out of his pack.
Just as he finished dressing, there was a sound outside the cabin door like an odd, trilling whistle, and he opened it to find Feffi outside. “We are catching mmmmmm your other friends now. Please come?”
The Scavenger Door Page 40