“…and what is it you do here?” Rachel asked.
“Folks like to come out and cut their own Christmas trees,” he said. “Lots of places like ours around, so we give ’em an experience. First o’ November through the first weekend of January, we got trees, ornaments, local chocolates. Rest o’ the year, we rent the space to vendors. Flea markets an’ gun shows, normally.”
“Where are the reindeer?”
“Don’t keep reindeer.” His conversational colors blurred towards orange-gray bemusement. “Critters live where it’s cold. They’d suffer down here.”
Rachel disagreed. She was getting chilly herself; early spring in the northerly reaches of Pennsylvania was much colder than she had expected. It didn’t help that there was a wind ripping through the quarry and back into the mountains. Everything was crisp and smelled slightly of dust and evergreens, with a faintly metallic note beneath that.
“Why Christmas trees?”
“I bought this land, ’bout twenty years ago. Mining company turned it to shit, so I bought it for pennies on the dollar. Evergreens ’bout all that’d grow back then. They like acid soil, you know? Ground’s getting better, but I’ll be long dead before we can do more than chickens and wildflowers.”
Rachel threw a scan over her shoulder. Wyatt was walking about five steps behind them, his focus on their conversation, with long yellow-white sweeps across the buildings as he searched for threats. She could have saved him the trouble: the buildings were empty. The only people within the length of three football fields were Ahren and the quiet lady selling honey in her after-season Christmas costume.
“You’re the owner?” she asked.
“Free an’ clear,” Ahren said, with a strong streak of red pride. “No liens, no loans, just taxes.”
“You pay taxes?” The words were out of her mouth before she could strangle her subconscious into silence.
Ahren stopped and looked at her. “Don’t you?”
She stared at him. Not her full-bore cyborg’s stare, but enough so he began to get wavy and orange around his edges.
He sighed and began walking again. “Yeah, I pay taxes. All of my taxes, an’ my tax accountant would be happy to talk to you.”
“Not what I meant,” she said. “Just that this isn’t what I expected from your operation.”
“Y’mean, my business?” He stressed the last word as the reds around him changed from pride to anger. “We pay our share, no more, no less. I got problems with people who don’t.” An angry red pointed directly at Southwestern turquoise.
“Oh, right. Here.” Rachel pushed a slip of paper into his hands.
“What—” He took a pair of bifocals out of his shirt pocket and perched these on the tip of his nose so he could study the paper. “Is this a receipt?”
“Yup,” she said. “Estimated cost for use of the helicopter from D.C. to here, and back again. Paying for the fuel and maintenance costs out of my own pocket. Since we haven’t formally charged Nicholson with a crime, my being here isn’t part of a criminal investigation. No taxpayers footing my bill today.”
“Ah,” he said. “I don’t see labor costs on here. What about the pilot? Who’s paying his salary?”
“She is a good friend of Agent Joshua Glassman, and they’ve agreed to work out payment between them. And no, I intentionally didn’t ask for the details so that’s all the information I can give you.”
He laughed. It was a warm, hearty sound, almost like what she’d expect from Santa Claus if he were a CrossFit enthusiast, and his reds slipped away. “All right,” he said. “You came prepared. Good for you.”
“Help me out here,” Rachel said, as Ahren turned and began leading them towards a large log cabin. “From what I’ve been told, you’re a militia, but you pay taxes?”
“Damn right, I pay taxes. I pay them ’cause I don’t want you people comin’ in and shooting up my family,” he said. “I’m not givin’ you an excuse.
“An’ I noticed you admitted you’re not here in an official capacity,” he added. “I’m seein’ you because Nicholson is an ass, an’ lettin’ him spin his lies might get my people hurt. If I’d thought he’d do somethin’ like this, I’d never’ve taken him in.”
Ahren opened the door of the log cabin for Rachel, and he followed her inside, the two of them dogged by Wyatt. The office was built like an old-fashioned cabin, the cracks between the exposed logs chinked closed with putty. The beams holding up the A-frame ceiling were draped with furs and blankets, and the windows were hung with large sheets of tanned cowhide in lieu of curtains. Almost everything in the room was yellow-gray from a veneer of cigarette smoke, misted across the walls through years of saturation.
Even the guns.
Rachel had expected some firearms, perhaps the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece or whatnot. But every square inch of available wall space served as a gun rack, or held a windowed cabinet overflowing with handguns and rifles, sometimes stacked two or three deep. There were multiple gun safes against the east wall, each of them much larger than the hidden document safe down in OACET’s War Room.
There were guns that were obviously, flagrantly illegal in many states. Maybe not in rural Pennsyltucky, true, but there were automatic rifles and sawed-off shotguns and—
Oh dear Lord, that’s a fucking anti-tank rifle, isn’t it. Is that legal? That can’t be legal. Not even here.
“Nice collection,” Rachel said, as she flopped down in the nearest chair with the silent hope that her scans would warn her if the cushion was stuffed with even more guns. “Love the useless showpieces. Really lovely. Just the nicest fake felony collection I’ve ever seen.”
Ahren feigned confusion.
“Let me guess,” she said, as she pointed at each of the big-ticket items. “Critical missing pieces or—” Rachel paused to scan the interior of one of the shotguns. “—molten metal poured down the barrels?
“Hey, what kind of test is this, exactly?” she added. “If you clear up exactly how you want me to react, I’ll be happy to oblige.”
He laughed again, but this time he trailed off into a long, hacking cough. He took a linen handkerchief from his pocket and coughed heavily into it. Rachel was bemused. She hadn’t seen a linen handkerchief since…ever? It struck her as quaint and homey. More quaint than homey, considering its status as a hotbed of germs, but still.
“I said we do gun shows here, yeah?” he said, once the coughing spell had passed. “Dealers know I’ll buy broken products. Hobby of mine.”
“And no never mind that a huge collection of broken firearms is excellent cover for any working versions you might have on the property?”
The older man waved towards his wall of weapons. “If you see any evidence of that, Agent, lemme know.”
“Sure thing.”
Ahren took a good, long look at her. It was the same kind of look she gave to suspects before she started to pick them apart. “You one of those liberal anti-gun nuts?”
“Nope,” Rachel said. “I’m a cop, and former Army, and I’ve been up against too many full-grown infants with automatic weapons to think the world can be fixed with flowers and happy thoughts. I’m about as anti-gun as you are.”
“Maybe I think you should be,” Ahren said. “Same technology that reads your thumbprint, unlocks your phone? No reason it can’t go in a gun.”
“Well,” Rachel said. “No reason except me.”
Wyatt began to laugh in purples.
“I’d love it,” Rachel said. “Don’t get me wrong. Me and my buddies have to go into a firefight? The enemy tries to unlock their weapons, I shut ’em down before we even get out of the car… Now it’s no longer a firefight. From a law enforcement perspective? It’s nothing but appealing, and I’d back the shit out of that legislation—pardon my French—but gun companies will never invest in the tech now. It’ll be blocked as a Second Amendment issue before it can get to market. OACET’s effectively killed the chance of any personal firearms tech that could be
used to save lives.
“Sorry,” she added.
“Unintended consequences,” Wyatt said from his spot near the window.
She shot him a Look: his conversational colors rolled over themselves in a purple-gray sigh, and he went back to pretending to be furniture.
“He’s right,” she said to Ahren. “For every innovation we introduce, we manage to screw up something else. It’s usually unintentional, and almost always because the general public’s convinced that OACET wants to dominate the planet. Have you seen the conspiracy theories about how we’re murdering people through their pacemakers? Someone’s filed a wrongful death suit against us because her husband’s pacemaker broke. And she lives in Kansas! Kansas!”
Rachel realized she was shouting. Just a little, but a little shouting was usually too much.
“Sorry,” she repeated.
Ahren’s conversational colors weighed her Southwestern turquoise against the teal of family and belonging. “Let’s talk somewhere else,” he said, as the scales in his mind balanced out.
He led them through another door to a wide hallway, and down that hallway to a pair of double doors at the rear of the cabin. Once through, they were behind the second fence, with the Christmas village and its cutesy-twee shops safely on the other side. The doors opened into a small apartment complex, with a dozen two- and three-story buildings on either side of wide evergreen tree-lined street.
Interesting, Rachel thought. The only way into this second part of the compound was through the office hallway. She was sure there was another entrance somewhere (if for no other reason than to move dirt and other farming equipment), but it didn’t trip to her short-range scans.
“Can’t help but notice that there’s nobody here,” Wyatt said.
“I sent everyone out,” Ahren said. “Free day—no work, no school. Couple of folks stayed behind for the chores that need doin’. There’s always chores on a farm.”
“I don’t see any lights on,” Rachel said. Partially true: she was more curious about how there was very little happening in the local digital ecosystem. The buildings didn’t have any power running through them. All of it felt lifeless and empty.
“Turned the generators off,” Ahren said. “Saves money when no one’s around. We’ll have a windmill in a few years, if sales stay good, but until then our grid’s on during peak hours ’n that’s all.”
He had much less Good Ol’ Boy in his accent than before, and the red pride was back in his conversational colors as he showed off the compound. He paused to yank a weed from an otherwise barren flowerbed, and then took them to where the street ended.
There was a playground, and beyond that and a third layer of fencing, a shooting range.
Rachel sent her scans along the range and drooled.
Sugar Camp’s shooting range was finger-kissin’ primo delicious! It was built with safety in mind, with the quarry to the left and wide open scrublands to the right, and easily a full ten acres to play with in the middle. There were blinds and targets carefully placed to take advantage of the landscape, and two towers of different heights set at different angles about five hundred yards to the north.
The taller of these towers had wide panels set across the top. Rachel recognized the form but couldn’t detect the function.
Ahren noticed. “We’re negotiating with a cellular service provider,” he explained. “The tower’s not active yet. But if the deal falls through, we get a great setup for solar power.”
She nodded. The cell company had most likely bumped into a possible public relations fiasco when upper management learned that they were leasing land rights from a militia.
“Did you plan for that?” she asked.
He smiled and kept walking.
At the head of the range was a fiberglass pergola frame covered with translucent plastic roofing. One wall of the shelter was made from DIY plywood cabinets. Rachel scanned these and found the usual safety peripherals found at shooting ranges, including some high-end ear protection.
“I was wonderin’, Agent Peng, if maybe you could show off for me a little.”
“Not all Agents are good with guns,” she said, a light poke.
“But you are. I’ve seen that video. The one with you in the parking garage, takin’ down that man.”
Wyatt went red at that.
Rachel grinned over her shoulder at him, then smiled at Ahren. “You know who I am.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re famous around here. Be a real pleasure to watch you shoot.”
She flipped open her suit coat to show him her empty holster. “Unarmed,” she said. “Thought you wouldn’t appreciate it if I brought a gun along to the meeting. Especially since I’m not here in an official capacity.”
“I think we can find something,” Ahren said, and his colors came damned close to twinkling in purples.
Five minutes later, a Sako 85 Finnlight was in her hands, a pair of ear protectors clamped around her head. Ahren cupped both hands to his mouth and shouted to nobody: “Clear the range!”
Rachel was pretty sure she was the best marksman in the world. Markswoman. Whatever. Nobody was about to argue nomenclature with someone capable of putting a bullet in their skull from a quarter-mile away, and blindfolded besides. Autoscripts similar to the one which allowed her to assess the lay of the land at a golf course also helped her line up a bullet to a target. And she could pull off trick shots like nobody else. Her ability to see into objects helped her assess density, and density could be used to plot a bullet’s ricochet. Not perfectly—ricochets were accidents by definition—but with enough reliability that she could confidently send a bullet into a piece of metal and bank a shot at a predictable angle.
Two years ago, she had crippled Wyatt’s Daddy Dearest by bouncing four shots off of the steel and concrete of a parking garage. That had been mostly luck: it had been her first time firing solid metal rounds, and as much as she adored her beloved concrete, it fractured too readily to be of much use to her in trick shooting. Now, two years and close to five hundred hours of practice later, her service weapon was always loaded with custom solid brass rounds so when she did have to use it, she could be sure she wouldn’t have to use it to kill.
Rachel sent her scans down the range, just to be sure, and took a test shot to check the quality of the gun. “Whoa!” she said appreciatively, as the Sako bullseyed the target at a thousand feet. “Nice rifle!”
Ahren said something in reply, but she couldn’t hear him. It was probably something nice about the gun: the synthetic blacks and silvers of the Sako’s stock and the reds of pride were twining together quite nicely.
Four more shots—each of them landed dead-center of the targets as she worked her way down the range and got a feel for the land and the wind—and then the gun was empty.
“Really nice!” She stood from her hunter’s crouch and removed the ear protectors. “This is a very decent piece!”
“It’s a favorite,” Ahren said. “You’re an incredible shot.”
“One of the benefits of being a cyborg,” she said, as she handed the rifle to Ahren.
“She could do this blindfolded,” Wyatt said dryly.
Ahren stood a little taller. “’s that true?”
This time, when she shot Wyatt a Look, she nailed him with the full weight of her cyborg’s stare. “Oh, it’s true,” he said, suddenly engrossed with fixing the band on his ear protectors. “She’d never do it in front of a crowd, but since it’s just the three of us, you’ve got no problems doin’ a little more showin’ off, right, Peng?”
And of course Wyatt had a convenient strip of heavy cloth handy, and it was just about long enough to be a small scarf.
She wound the blindfold around her head, twice, and knotted it tight.
A blindfold.
Oh no, she did not want to do this in front of Wyatt. The psychopath already had suspicions about—
Her skin crawled as she saw Southwestern turquoise walking through his conversa
tional colors, surrounded by walls of sandstone.
Oh. Oh, no.
She had left him wrapped up like a sausage in its casing and handcuffed to the radiator. So, naturally, he had escaped and gone wandering around the halls.
A man’s scent, his footsteps—
Rachel snatched up the Sako, reloaded it, and fired five shots as fast as the bolt action would permit.
She yanked off the blindfold and shoved the rifle at Ahren. Her ears were ringing; she had forgotten the protectors. “We good?
Ahren blinked, eyes moving between her and the furthest target on the range. He checked the target through the scope, colors swirling into a single razor-sharp point. “Ah…” he began. “Ah…yeah.”
They retired to a patio table beneath the canopy. The table was old, one of those round pieces of tin from the ’60s, with a set of matching wirework chairs. The entire thing had been spray-painted in a fresh spring green.
“You smoke?” he asked, a beaten pack of cigarettes appearing in one hand like a magician’s deck of cards. He reached down and picked up an old metal coffee can that had entered a second life as an ashtray.
“No,” she said. “But I don’t mind the smell.”
“I do,” he said, wetting a finger to test the wind. He decided he was fine with where he was sitting, and lit the cigarette with a cheap plastic lighter. “Bad habit, I know. Too expensive. Been tryin’ to quit but I keep pickin’ it back up.”
He used the cigarette to point at the furthest target before taking a long drag. “That’s some impressive shooting, Agent Peng.”
“I was a good shot before I got the implant,” she said, watching Wyatt. He had moved over to the playground’s fence, out of earshot but close enough to respond if needed. “I’m a great shot now—we think the implant creates a biofeedback process that improves physical performance.”
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