Finder

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Suit still sealed?” Harcourt asked on their private channel.

  A few yellow warning lights flared in Fergus’s peripheral display, but his suit was unbreached. “I’m good,” he said. He felt shaky, and he resented the hell out of the fact that people were trying this hard to kill him before he’d even done anything to them yet. “Guess we don’t have to worry about what to do with the prototype,” he added.

  Harcourt’s men came flying out into the bay. “Bale, what’s the situation?” Harcourt asked.

  “Katra is heading back here,” Bale replied, offering a hand to pull Harcourt through the envelope opening. Fergus managed to get himself out behind them. “I heard her on the comms, and she’s gone fusion.”

  “I expect we’ll be—” Harcourt started to say.

  “Danger!” Bale shouted, and used his leverage on a bar to shove Harcourt roughly to one side. There was a bright flash, and the heat sensors on Fergus’s suit registered the shot as it passed.

  The other man was reacting too, grabbing Harcourt and pulling him into the lee of a pillar. Fergus was dodging on his own, looking for cover, as Bale shot back toward the corridor. Diving behind a rack of fire-suppression equipment, Fergus could now see what had tipped off Bale: small red droplets carried on the current from the air systems toward the return vent.

  “Give up, and we won’t hurt you!” someone called over the public comm channel.

  I know that accent, Fergus thought. There were advantages to traveling as much as he did. “Name your ken!” he called back.

  There was a brief silence, then, “I will not!” Several shots accompanied the answer for emphasis, driving them back behind cover.

  There were flashes of light around the corner. Harcourt’s man pushed over to the wall, then down close to the floor. Bale and Harcourt trained their pistols carefully at the edge of the wall to provide cover fire.

  Harcourt’s other man peered quickly around the corner, fired a shot, then pulled back.

  “Gurne, situation?” Harcourt asked.

  “Hit one,” the man answered. “Three left. Blue stripes, face shields on mirror. Four bodies: two of Katra’s guard and the two techs. Also, they have a hostage.”

  “Fuck,” Harcourt said. “Blue? Vinsic?”

  “No,” Fergus said. “They’ve got to be Gilger’s.”

  A blue-striped figure moved carefully around the corner, one arm around Katra’s neck, the other holding a pistol by her side. He had her positioned as a human shield. Her suit had several burn holes in it, blood peppering the air around them in rhythm with her pulse. “Trade you,” the man said. “Governor’s pet for yours.”

  Fergus could see her eyes darting around, taking in who was where. Her expression was one of unmitigated fury.

  “Katra?” Harcourt asked.

  “Yeah, Harry?” she said. “I’m a bit busy right now.”

  “How badly are you hurt?”

  She shook her head behind her face shield. From where he was, Fergus could see that most of her suit lights were flashing red. She’s not going to make it, he realized.

  The man put his pistol up against her ear. “No more talking. Trade now,” he said. “Last chance.”

  “I don’t fucking do hostage negotiations,” Katra said. She jerked her knees up sharply, pulling the man forward. In his momentary distraction, she managed to wrap her hand around his holding the pistol and squeeze. The pistol fired.

  She went slack, the inside of her face shield painted red. The man pushed himself away, trying to get undercover again as Harcourt and his men opened fire. The man jerked, a small plume of red erupting from his shoulder just before he disappeared back around the corner.

  “Comms are being blocked outside this immediate area. We have to get out of here now,” Harcourt said. “Bale, this is your stomp; can you get Mr. Ferguson out of here without anyone seeing you?”

  “No problem,” Bale said.

  “If you can’t get him to Bugrot, get him anywhere he can hole up safely and stay with him until you hear otherwise from me. Fergus, you still got your data?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. Let’s get out of this trap while we can.”

  Harcourt did a graceful flip in place behind the pillar and kicked off for the jammed envelope opening, passing through with minimal resistance. Bale pointed at Fergus, then jacked his thumb toward the hole. “Now you,” he said.

  Shots followed him as he dove after Harcourt, through the envelope, and out. Bale and Gurne came through moments later under another volley of fire. Harcourt was already pulling himself out of sight on the rock; Gurne followed.

  Bale grabbed Fergus’s arm and kicked off from the wall, pulling him toward the cargo tunnel. “We’re going this way,” he said. Unceremoniously he pulled him into the chute. “Your public comm off?”

  “Yes,” Fergus said after checking it.

  “Then be quiet while I save your ass.”

  That seemed a fair bargain, so he shut up and followed Bale, pulling himself hand over hand along the cargo rail through the narrow, grimy tunnel. Suddenly the tunnel widened out and Bale pulled him into a side chute. “Jam bypass,” he said. “Hold still and cover the lights on your suit controls.”

  Fergus did so, and moments later a crate came flying past them down the chute. “That was to test for obstructions, i.e. us,” Bale said. “If I thought someone was hiding in here, I’d hope the first crate would spook them into making a run for it and send another one right about now.”

  Another crate whizzed past.

  “How do you know they aren’t just normal cargo?”

  Bale shook his head.

  “Oh, right,” Fergus said. “No one else alive on the platform. Now what?”

  “Now we wait a bit longer to see if they decide the tunnel is empty after all and go away or come in looking for us.”

  A light began to play up over the walls of the tunnel. Bale held up a finger for silence, and Fergus waited. After agonizing minutes, Bale suddenly flicked on an extremely bright handlight. The figure in the tunnel threw a blue-striped arm up over his face, and Bale took aim with his pistol and fired.

  “Get moving,” he said. “No one’s going to be sending any more crates in until they clear the body out, but they know for sure we’re in here now.”

  They pulled themselves forward until the tunnel forked, and Bale led Fergus to the left. “The right side heads into a depot; they probably have someone waiting there by now,” he said. “Left is a much longer path, but there’s an abandoned cut-off ahead.”

  “How do you know the cargo tunnels so well?”

  “Mezz Rock born. Grew up playing in here, gaming the tunnels with my brother,” Bale said. He touched the scar under his chin self-consciously. “Not always successfully.”

  The tunnel forked again, the left side dusty and disused and narrow. Bale went about two body-lengths in and then stopped, paused to do something Fergus couldn’t see, then pushed himself through a small, filthy hatch. Fergus followed him and to his surprise found an airlock dead ahead. “Close the hatch behind you,” Bale told him, already climbing in.

  Fergus did as Bale said, and when the lock had reset, he crammed himself into the small chamber and cycled himself through into a large, dark space. Bale was shining his handlight around inside the room. Finding what he was looking for, he dusted off a small panel and hit some buttons. Dim lights illuminated the faded gray interior.

  Something skittered across the floor and walls, disappearing into cracks and corners and shadows. Fergus jumped. “Uh, what was that?” he asked.

  “Ballroaches,” Bale said. “Most of the old rocks in Cernee have them if they have air. Sort of like halfway between a small cockroach and a spider. They sting. Sharp little fuckers can go right through a suit.”

  “Not spore ticks?”

 
“No. Look like them but bigger.”

  “Great,” Fergus said. “Poisonous?”

  “Mildly toxic. Burns like shit, and you’ll get a welt, but they’re not parasites. I wouldn’t want to fall into a pit of them, though.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “Down here? Maybe,” Bale said. He smiled.

  There were several more airlocks leading off the chamber, a row of cabinets covering one wall, and stacked hammocks covering the opposite. “What is this place?” Fergus asked.

  Bale flipped open his face shield, folded back his hood, and wrinkled his nose. “Smelly, is what it is,” he said. With his hair disheveled and his expression of unguarded, nostalgic bemusement, he looked less like an enforcer and more like a regular person. A regular person who works out a lot and could probably break you in half over his knee, Fergus amended.

  “It’ll take the air handlers a while to catch up; no one’s been in here for a long time,” Bale said. “This is one of the old emergency shelters, built during the days when the Rock was still being mined. Most of them have been reabsorbed by the settlement, but not this one; the rock spinward from here is porous and unstable, so they’ve left it alone.”

  Fergus opened his own face shield and grimaced. Now I know what decades-old rockcrapper body odor smells like, he thought. Guess I can cross that off my to-do list.

  “So miners came here in a cave-in?” he asked.

  “Yeah, or to hide during an attack. If you didn’t know your way through, the mining tunnels were deadly. If someone was trying to take your rock, all you needed to do was hunker down long enough for them to decimate themselves, then come out and finish off whoever was left.”

  “That happen a lot when you were a kid?”

  “Me? Naw. My grandfather, though, he had tales to tell. He’s the one who showed me around the old tunnels, made sure I knew them. Paranoid old gitz. Best grandfather ever.”

  “Mine taught me to fish,” Fergus said.

  “To what?” Bale asked.

  “Never mind. What just happened? Katra—”

  “—wouldn’t have done what she did if she didn’t already count herself dead. I always said that woman had a spine of titanium.” Bale was rummaging through the cabinets, came out with a small box, and jacked it straight into the room’s control panel. “Signal’s bad this deep in, but I left this booster last time I was here. Hang on while I see if we can get any news.”

  Fergus hung near the airlock, waiting. What if this is a setup? he wondered. He had everything Mr. Harcourt would need to take Gilger’s ship for himself; all the man would need to do was keep him prisoner here and make him crack the code. Then he could just leave my body in this stinkhole for eternity.

  For an arms dealer, Harcourt hadn’t seemed a particularly dishonest type. If that was a contradiction . . . well, Fergus was a similarly contradictory thief. Besides, Mattie Vahn had trusted Harcourt; that shouldn’t have mattered, but it did.

  “Shit,” Bale said eventually. “Comms are messed, probably blocked, but I reached a friend here inside the Rock where the local signal is strong enough to get through. Gurne and Mr. Harcourt got away, but there was a lot of fire from rockside chasing them out. Word is there’s fighting inside Blackcans; Vinsic must be trying to take control of it.”

  “Why Vinsic?”

  “Blue stripes. That’s Vinsic’s House color.”

  “The one who called out to us, though—he had to have been Gilger’s.”

  Bale’s eyebrows went up. “Why?”

  “I said, Name your ken—name your family. It’s a Luceatan thing. Sort of means ‘Promise on the name of your family.’ He and the guy who was holding Katra both had Luceatan accents.”

  Bale slung himself into one of the hammocks. “You’re right. And I didn’t even notice at the time,” he said. “Here’s my best guess: Gilger freaked out about your machine, because of course he’s guilty as hell of blowing up that cable car. So he blocks the experiment, but maybe he’s not sure he’ll get there in time or if you could still pick up something, so he arranges for a dive-bomber to take you and the machine out.”

  “Makes sense so far,” Fergus said.

  “The complication is that Mr. Harcourt is there too. If Gilger tries but fails to kill you both, he’s got an open war on his hands he can’t easily win.”

  “Right. But the alternative is running the risk I could prove he was responsible for the deaths of Mattie Vahn and thirty-seven people on Rattletrap,” Fergus said. “So he frames Vinsic for the attack?”

  “Vinsic’s been keeping to himself more than usual the last half standard or so. I’ve seen fewer of his people out and around Cernee, but I didn’t really think about it until now.”

  “Some of his top people have gone missing.”

  “How long did you say you’ve been here?”

  “About three days,” Fergus said. “I read up.”

  “I guess you did.” Bale shook his head. “So maybe he and Gilger have been going after each other and we just didn’t know it. Or Gilger wants Mr. Harcourt and Vinsic at odds with each other for some other reason. Either way, I don’t like it.”

  “So far, me neither.”

  “Taking out Katra is not just the children squabbling in the crèche anymore, that’s one of the kids killing Nursie. Whatever chance there was of this getting settled with only a few heads knocked together is gone. This isn’t going to end well.”

  Bale floated close enough to a wall to grab a cabinet. He opened it, sending off a cloud of dust, took out decrepit packs of survival rations one by one, and looked at their labels. Shrugging, he put them all back in. “I need to tell my people that the ambush was Luceatans. If we can get word back to Leakytown, we’ve got a point-to-point there that can talk directly to the Wheels no matter how fouled up the comms are. Mr. Harcourt will know what to do. You’re safe here, but it’s hard to do much of anything useful in a cave. And now your weird junk machine is destroyed.”

  “It’s complicated,” Fergus said, “but the machine doesn’t really matter.”

  “Then why— No, don’t tell me. Do you trust me and want to stick with me for a while, or do you want me to try to get you back to Bugrot to fend for yourself?”

  Fergus looked around the old room. Prison, tomb, or sanctuary? “You can get me out of here?”

  “I can get you out of the tunnels right now and let you go your own way in Mezz Rock, if that’s what you want, but it’s dangerous. I wouldn’t recommend it, but I don’t know if you have any reason to trust me beyond my honest face.”

  Nothing had gone right from the moment Fergus had crossed into Cernee’s Halo. What if I get these people killed? What if they get me killed?

  “Is Bugrot safe?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening out there,” Bale said. “Are you willing to wait here at least long enough for me to contact our people and get more information?”

  “What if something happens to you?” Fergus asked.

  Bale grinned. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. This is home. Your call, though.”

  Adrenaline was pounding through Fergus like a million jittery lemmings on stampede. He didn’t like this place at all, but couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. And the clock was ticking, counting down the time until his window to respond to the handshake expired. Once that passed, Gilger would know they’d made a fool of him with the “prototype.” I can’t spend my forty-eight hours running away. I need Harcourt just as much as he needs me.

  “Okay,” he said. “Do it.”

  “Good. Sorry to leave you bored stuck in here.”

  “It’s okay. I have some things to think through,” Fergus said. “But if I need to get out before you come back, tell me which way to go.”

  “I can drop a map to your pad,” Bale said. “Uh, if you get hungry .
. .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . don’t try any of the stuff in the cabinets. Gave us kids the shits for a week when we tried it, and I’m sure it hasn’t aged its way to better.”

  “Great,” Fergus said. “Be careful out there.”

  Bale gave a weary thumbs-up, pulled his face shield down, and cycled himself out one of the other airlocks.

  Chapter 9

  As soon as Fergus was alone, the abandoned emergency shelter began to feel like a trap. He’d been in tougher places before, but always with information, with an idea of what he’d gotten himself into. He flung himself in lazy circles in the hammock until dizziness made him give up and stare for a long time at what he was fairly sure was the floor. The air systems had kicked in, and whatever particulate dust had been lazily cluttering the stale air now swirled around, slowly drawn toward the vents by whatever paths seemed to involve drifting past his nostrils as many times as possible.

  He sneezed at the floor, then made a rude gesture at it before turning himself back up to face the ceiling. Not that it made any difference in the shelter’s dismal landscape. You’ve never failed a job, he told himself. You’ve never failed to get yourself out of whatever mess you were in. You are all you need. Get over the fear and be useful.

  He pulled his handpad out of his pocket and turned it on. It had decrypted the signal Venetia’s Sword had sent back.

  Moose

  Syrup of figs

  Ring Me

  Tot

  McFadden’s Row

  C’ga A⊄

  Pluto

  And that was the handshake. Seven keys. He had forty-six and a half hours left to find the right response to each one. If he did it, the ship was his. If he didn’t . . .