“Fuck.”
“I didn’t tell them anything, just that we were delivering a cargo.”
I sucked my teeth. “Burden sicced them on us. Shit.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too. But I didn’t get that vibe from them. I think they suspect him. They could have been looking for information about his scam. Or, just looking for him, period. That Ek, what’s xis name, might have set an inquiry in motion after we left.”
I privately gave thanks for Irene’s professionalism. She had put aside her disappointment at being left behind. She was doing her job. “If they figure it all out, it’s going to look bad that we didn’t say anything to Olthamo.”
“I know.” Our joint responsibility crackled, unspoken. Dolph had wanted to spill the beans to Olthamo, but we had overridden him. “Well, that’s all I got, Cap’n.”
I sighed. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“What’s your ETA?”
The desert rolled past, rock-ribbed, unchanging. “Local noon-ish.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Will do. Sit on the guns, and when Dolph comes back, tell him to freaking stay there. We might need you to come and pick us up.”
“Seriously?”
“I don’t know. Just trying to anticipate all the possible scenarios.”
After I ended the call, I tried to think it through. Burden had left Mittel Trevoyvox. Where had he gone? God only knows. I would have hoped he’d run back to the Traveller motherships in the Core. But it was not impossible that he had come here. Why would he do that? He didn’t know we were coming here … did he?
“MF.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Drive for a bit.” While MF clutched the wheel in his grippers, I scrambled up on the gunner’s saddle and test-fired the roof-mounted .50. Dust puffed from rocks so far away I needed binoculars.
The noise woke Martin. “Are we there yet?”
“Almost. Are you done digesting?”
“Almost.”
We started to pass through the internment camps in the middle of the morning. They looked like low green hedges at a distance. Up close, the green was green plastic tents straggling along the road. Barreling through at 50 kph, I got fleeting impressions of roadside stalls, dogs, children playing in the dust. In the early afternoon, we reached Camp 32 and turned off onto a side street.
It was bad.
Splitting bags of garbage rotted in the sun. Camp dogs fought over putrid scraps. Sewage flowed along an open gutter in the middle of the street. The stench coiled down my throat. People crossed the road ahead of us, limping, hopping, dragging one foot. The worst cases could not walk unaided. Heads lolling, bodies wasted, they had to be supported by the children who seemed to be the only healthy people in the camp.
My mouth dried out. My knuckles went white on the wheel. Try as I might, I could not compartmentalize this nightmare away. I could not distance myself from these people. Because their present was my future.
This was what it looked like to die of interstellar variant kuru.
Breathing deeply, fighting for calm, I pulled up in front of the camp’s headquarters, a two-storey concrete building with a Hurtworlds Authority sign on the roof. A queue of broken people snaked out of the doorway. The building was right on the edge of the camp. Behind it, a field of solar panels drank up the sun. On a low rise beyond the solar installation, more than a klick away, sand-filled gabions and a force field perimeter protected a small army base.
I killed the engine. The sounds of the camp flooded in.
“My sweet Lord,” Martin said, darting his head between the front seats. “We have come to the end of the universe.”
“Y’all stay here,” I said, as if from a great distance. “I’ll make enquiries.”
I tugged my t-shirt out of my pants, to hide the .22 in my waistband, and pushed my shades up on my head, to look less scary. I went into the HA building. A huge fan whirred in the doorway, stirring the smells and the heat.
“Are you here to fix the solar plant?” said the young woman working at a computer near the fan.
“Is it malfunctioning?” I said.
“You could say that, or you could just come right out and say that the residents stole the control unit and traded it for drugs.”
“I’m not here to fix anything,” I said.
She looked at me properly for the first time. She was in her twenties, wearing a white caftan with the HA logo on the chest. Tendrils of fair hair adhered to her pink forehead. I could smell her sweat from where I was standing—a wholesome scent, after the odor of sewage and rotting garbage that pervaded the place.
Despite myself, I thought of Christy Day, 58 light years away. Christy had also done her government service on the Hurtworlds. The experience had profoundly affected her, leaving her with a lifelong drive to help the less fortunate. But she must have been that kind of person to begin with. You don’t just get sent to the Hurtworlds. You have to volunteer. If I was ever tempted to get down on mainstream humanity, I only had to think of Christy. And this girl was clearly cast in the same tough mould.
“Aren’t you worried about catching it?” I said without thinking.
“IVK? No. You can only get it by consuming infected tissues.”
I could have told her different. But that wasn’t what I was here for. “I’ve got some stuff to deliver to one of your residents.” I was grateful for Irene’s foresightedness, even though the presents we had brought almost seemed like an affront to this sinkhole of misery.
“Who?” the girl said. “We have five thousand residents.”
“This one’s named Pippa Khratz. She’s a recent arrival, as in the last few weeks.”
The volunteer’s eyes widened. “That’s weird.”
“What is?”
“Why is everyone looking for her?”
Uh oh. “Who else is?”
“Are you with them?”
“With who?”
“Those … those people.”
She got up. I followed her rustling caftan and slapping sandals up two flights of stairs to the roof. The sun hammered down on a satellite dish and an A/C ventilation unit. The volunteer pointed across the camp.
“Them.”
I dropped my shades over my eyes to cut the glare. About a quarter klick away, an open area in the heart of the camp served as a bazaar. Canopied stalls surrounded a row of public water faucets where children filled buckets. A couple of grunts idly patrolled the water line. At one edge of the bazaar stood another Hurtworlds technical, larger than ours. It was the front end of a pickup grafted onto a fuel tanker. Beside it, two people manned a table heaped with goods.
“I’ve reported them, but they just won’t leave,” the volunteer said.
“Who are they?”
“Pedlars. They come from the Red Flowers district. They sell little luxuries to the residents. Honestly, they’re mostly drug pushers. But these ones …” She nervously lowered her voice, so I could hardly hear her over the A/C unit. “They’ve been asking around for Pippa Khratz. I keep telling them there’s no such person here.”
20
“No such person here?” Martin said, when I got back to the technical and told them what I had learned.
“She is here,” MF insisted.
“Let’s get a look at these so-called pedlars,” Martin said. “Shoot one of ‘em, see if they got any tattoos.” He was getting into the spirit of the thing.
“That’s Plan B.” I put the technical in gear and drove away from the Hurtworlds Authority building, back towards the road. Martin Shifted back into human form as I drove. He pulled on a plaid shirt and jeans and squatted behind the seats.
I parked on the shoulder of the road, where there were some stalls selling bottled drinks, diesel, and cigarettes. “OK. Marty, change places.” I climbed past the gunner’s saddle, into the back. Martin clambered into the driver’s seat. Hidden by the jerrycans of diesel, and all the suitcases and crates of stuff we�
��d brought for Pippa, I wormed out of my clothes and Shifted into my wolf.
“Pippa knows this form,” I said, scrambling back over the seats into Martin’s lap. “I’ll go look for her. You talk to the locals.” I nodded at the children manning the roadside stalls. “Find out how long these pedlars have been here, if there are any more of them around … just find out whatever you can.”
“What about me?” MF said.
“Stay there and pretend to be a suitcase.” How I wished now that I’d brought Dolph or Irene. Martin was reliable in a fight, but MF would be about as much use as … a suitcase.
“Jesus, you’re heavy,” Martin grunted as my toenails dug into his thighs. “I’m sorry, but no one is going to mistake you for a dog.”
“There you go, thinking like a civilized person again.”
“Point.” He opened the door.
I jumped down to the ground and trotted back into the camp.
Down here closer to the ground, foul smells assaulted my wolf’s keen nose. Rats scurried along the open sewers. People lay in their tents, doing nothing, staring at screens, or wearing VR headsets. Martin’s words about the end of the universe came back to me. The dust coated skin and hair, collapsing the spectrum of human coloring into a uniform brown. Those camp dogs were everywhere, and they were big, wolfish creatures. I guess I looked enough like them to pass at a glance, especially now that my fur was covered with dust. But they knew. They hackled and snarled at me. Some of them were acting as care animals, pulling cripples on carts, wearing little harnesses.
“Pippa,” I called. “Pippa.”
No one even seemed to notice the talking wolf, except for the children. They peeked out of tents, or threw stones. One thing that the residents of Camp 32 clearly had the energy to do was procreate like rabbits. How freaking irresponsible did you have to be to have kids when you had IVK?
“Pippa. Pippa.”
Unawares, I had been running, as if I could outrun my own future. Now I was hot and out of breath. I slowed to a walk, my tongue hanging out. In wolf form, I could not sweat; I had to cool myself by panting. Drool dripped from my lips, as if I was a real animal.
A stone hit my rump. I spun and snarled at a little boy with nothing but meanness in his eyes. Which of us was the animal? How long would it take me, if I were deported to a place like this, to become an animal inside as well as out?
I capered on blindly, calling Pippa’s name. I must have searched the whole camp, some parts of it twice. At last I had to accept that it was hopeless. She could be anywhere, or nowhere.
At least I had shown myself to a good number of the camp residents. If they had any curiosity at all, the story of the talking dog, or wolf, would spread quickly, and then Pippa would know I was here.
As I retraced my steps, I heard pop music crackling from poor-quality speakers.
Well, there was one place I hadn’t searched yet.
The bazaar.
I had meant to go back and get Martin before venturing in there, but I couldn’t resist taking a quick look at the pedlars. I trotted between the last tents and out into the open space.
The bazaar was a bigger, noisier affair than it had looked like from the HA building’s roof. Stalls sold junk, recycled electronics, and food. None of these people had any GCs, of course, but the human urge to buy and sell doesn’t die that easily. People were swapping home-printed barter tokens and blisterpacks of meds in place of credits. The canopies of the stalls, hand-woven from strips of HA tarps, fluttered in the breeze. The children at the water faucets shoved, splashed, and laughed.
I sat on my haunches, tongue hanging out, watching the pedlars through the crowd.
One man, one woman. Both young. Shorts, t-shirts, boots. Their faces bore splotches of what looked like rosacea, the telltale “red flowers” of the eponymous disease—but I didn’t put too much stock in that. They could have set their tattoos to imitate the marks, or done them with makeup. They were mostly selling cheap, alien-grade electronics. I guess that’s what real pedlars sell. So do Travellers, when they’re not selling stolen spaceships.
A couple of grunts came around, riding on their shielded segways, and stopped by the pedlars’ table to say hey. Now that was depressing.
When the soldiers had gone, I trotted over to get a closer look. I slunk behind a stall where women served up smelly messes in HA-issue steel bowls. I was now about ten feet from the grille of the pedlars’ big rig.
I poked my nose out …
… and saw my ex-wife.
*
Sophia climbed down the steps of their rig, her beautiful legs bared by shorts that skimmed her ass cheeks. She greeted the younger two, then dropped onto a folding chair and pensively unwrapped a protein bar.
I crouched motionless, aghast.
Could it really be her?
She was supposed to be on Valdivia, thirty light years from here!
But of course it was her. I would never forget those those smouldering dark eyes, or the petulant set of her full lips. She had not made up her face with fake red flowers. She was too vain. The delicate rambling rose tattoo on her jaw writhed as she chewed her protein bar.
According to Timmy Akhatli, she had run to Valdivia. I had assumed she would stay there, hiding out until the heat was off.
So much for my assumptions. Instead of lying low, she had come looking for the TrZam 008.
She must know about the crown jewels of the Darkworlds, from Rafael Ijiuto.
And now here she was.
Ten feet from me.
Unaware that the “dog” sitting by the soup stall was her ex-husband.
How could she have forgotten this form? My wolf had been one of her favorites. I used to lie in wolf form on the sofa with her while we watched movies. I used to … no, better not think about that. Anyway, she clearly had forgotten my wolf, the same way she’d forgotten her own daughter’s name.
I nosed around the ground, where bits of food had fallen from the soup stall, moving closer to them.
“I’m so fucking bored,” said the girl Traveller, sitting on a folding chair.
“Suck it up, honey,” Sophia said.
“How much longer ya figure this is going to take?” The boy was sitting on the steps of the big rig, chewing a toothpick.
“It’ll take as long as it takes,” Sophia said. “It’s all part of the mission. Eyes on the prize.” She spoke in a dry tone, as if she knew how empty the motivational phrases were.
I scratched the ground, pretending to have found something good-smelling. That took me another few steps closer.
Sophia sat forward as if a thought had suddenly struck her. “Think of it like this.” Intellectual intensity animated her face. I had always loved that look on her. “The Divine wants each one of us to fulfill their potential. Our identities are formed through obedience to the Spirit of the Divine, which speaks to us through our patron deities, and guides us to the experiences we need to form our identities, or you could say our destinies.”
She used to talk like this even before she left. In those days, her ideas about the Divine had been more indebted to Christianity. When she discovered the Traveller pantheon of trickster deities and hellraising demons, it must have clicked for her: here, at last, was a god, or a smorgasbord of gods, who reflected her own view of the universe. I had heard from Zane that the Travellers practised meditation to get in touch with their “patron deities.” I wondered which one Sophia had chosen.
For that matter, what about Zane? Where was he? I had left him on Gvm Uye Sachttra with a mangled hand …
“The Divine has guided us here. We’ve been chosen, because we’re the only ones in the whole damn universe who actually listen to the Spirit, and aren’t afraid of its guidance. We are the elite who will take the next step towards humanity’s destiny. That’s no lie. But you know, it isn’t all gonna be space battles and … and piles of money falling in your lap. Part of it is—” she gestured around the bazaar— “this. Let yourself experie
nce it. It’s neither good nor bad. Those are traps that we fall into. Mental failure modes. Whatever it is, it just is.”
The girl stared at her blankly. The boy removed his toothpick from his mouth and peered at the chewed end.
“OK,” Sophia sighed. “Well.” I almost felt for her at that moment. “Think of it like this, then. If we succeed, you’ll be able to have anything you want. What do you want most in the universe? You’ll get it.”
This was more the boy’s style. He started to posture about having his own ship, having a harem, owning slaves. But the girl looked at Sophia curiously.
“What do you want most in the universe, ma’am?”
Sophia smiled. “I want to look like I did when I was twenty-five, and live forever.” She crossed her legs the other way, and her gaze fell on me. She held out her hand. “Here, doggy.”
Her low, confident voice still had the power to wrap around my balls like a leash. Forget looking twenty-five, she still looked every bit as good to me as the day we met. What did it say about me that, even knowing what I did about her, I still would’ve screwed her again?
“Here, doggy.” She tossed me a crumb of her protein bar.
Staying in character, I lipped it up from the ground. It was the kind that tastes like corned beef. Pretty good, even with a coating of dirt.
“Good doggy,” she said. “Want some more?” She broke off a larger crumb and held it out in her fingers. Her face wore the mildly interested smile of a woman feeding a stray dog. “Here, boy …”
I shied away, playing wary. I was trying to think what to do.
What I should have done, of course, was run.
But I never was any damn good at turning my back on trouble.
“You look like my ex,” Sophia said, and laughed.
My heart skipped a beat. I nosed a bit closer, sniffing the ground.
“I used to be married to a Shifter looked kind of like that dog,” Sophia told the other two.
They all laughed.
“My ex looked like a dog, too,” the boy said.
Sophia’s eyes flicked to the big rig.
The door of the cab opened and a man’s legs emerged. The boy jumped off the steps to make way. Sophia stood up.
Dirty Job Page 12