Cormorant Run

by Lilith Saintcrow

They wouldn’t move until dawn. Here, they were relatively safe. The sentry would wake the others if the wind changed, or if the flat rustling grassland all around started to run with inky blackness, or if the half-seen shapes in the middle distance, full of swaying shagginess as they grazed, lifted their heads uneasily.

  Vetch waited. His was second watch, and he should have been able to nap, at least. Cabra listened to him breathe, obviously still awake, but he said nothing.

  None of them did. There was nothing to say.

  28

  BOOGALOOS

  They were all asleep but one. Svin sat cross-legged next to the banked fire, listening.

  Two of the sardies snored, one in long gulping inhales and the other in short nasal bursts. Another lay on his side with his arm over his head; the fourth just breathed in the heavy satisfied way only a large well-fed man could. The fifth sardie—the ghost-eyed one with the blond tips, the one Kopelund had probably sent along to kill her, if he could, and take the Cormorant right before they came back out—was awake, staring at the ceiling, just the dim glitter of those pale irises reflecting what little stray light tiptoed his way.

  The foreign scientist—Tremaine—whistled while he breathed. Sounded like something dry and hairy was stuck in that high-prowed nose of his. Eschkov had nodded off bent over a lap-board; he would wake to find a pool of spittle on the gleaming surface as it ran the data he had keyed in over and over, showing an adjusted result each time. Barko settled early and lay for a long time with his eyes closed, but he dropped off eventually. The bald man would probably have nightmares.

  Outside, the Rift sang.

  A low perpetual grumble lay at the very bottom of the auditory landscape. Tiny pinpricking scrapes needled up through the hum, and bushes rattled or stilled. An invisible rake clawed, snarling softly, through what had been pavement pressed by human boots just that afternoon, digging into the soft loam and juicy grass it had become. High, crystalline tinkling echoed overhead, oddly like the superstructure of a massive dome singing as wind brushed along its harp-tight beams. The night-hunting birds were out, owls with great baffle-silent wings and softly glowing excrescences around their mad, piercing eyes; the tall storklike stangers, their bills clacking softly every once in a while as toads and other things made ribbitcreaks along every rill of fluid, water or otherwise. Leather-winged bats, flapping with ponderous and ungainly agility, scooped at chitinous streams of night-flying insects with their shoveljaws, squeaking and crunching delicately. A few feral dogs circled the house the rifter had chosen, their yips and yaps vanishing in the distance.

  Chances were, she wouldn’t hear them again. Inside the Rift, humans were a liability, no matter how domesticated the creatures had been pre-Event. Sometimes they clocked a rifter team, sensing a chance at easy food. There were stories about dogs following a rifter out through the shimmer, but not many, and she’d never seen a rifter with a pet.

  Most had enough trouble looking just after themselves.

  The closest sound was the slide of fur along wall or rock or grass, and soft damp pod-paddings. The boogaloos were out, their cushioned, prowling feet feeling delicately along every surface, their bulging eyes sprinkled with phosphorescence. They were largely harmless, herbivores to boot, but if you startled them, their unsheathed claws could go straight through anything less than concrete and gut you on the other side. So you moved slowly, mimicking their own groping progress and looping paths. It was when their silver-furred bulks began to vanish and you realized you hadn’t seen one in a while that the real danger started, between every patch of deeper darkness maybe holding a squeezer and every flicker at the corner of your vision a possible shimmer, and the other things as well. The air pressure might change as a wall moved through—in daytime you could see it coming, pushing down vegetation and scattering dust particles too light to be caught. Sometimes the wall would just roll over you and leave you bruised and shaken, but most of the time it was charged. You could get a nasty shock or flat-out electrocuted, for example.

  If the wall held any other kind of radiation, you were fuckered up but good. Your flesh could be boiled dry in an instant, all your liquids evaporated out through your skin, or your bones reduced to splinters. The walls could generally be sensed after dark, but that didn’t help. Put a foot wrong at night and you could end up in a puddle of Rift slime. The silvery almost-sentient sort only backed off when confronted with a spraycan of mass-produced glaslime, but there were streamlets and puddles of other sludges in every shape and size. Old Jervy, working the Birmingham Rift, had sworn there was a particular puddle-type that would turn whatever you dipped in it to gold.

  Some corporation had taken an interest. Jervy didn’t come back after one of his runs and for a while they were offering a bounty for a rifter to go in looking for that fabulous puddle. The corporate clone in charge of offering the bait money seemed to think it was like finding someone lost in regular mountains. Follow the footsteps and the broken branches, look for piles of the animal’s shit, and run it to ground.

  Svin almost smiled. Maybe Jervy’s bones were gold-dipped now. It would please the old fucker to be plated.

  So far Ashe’s map held up. Svin’s indirect probing at the edges of the Rift’s whirl told her which way the current was going, and unless it reversed she was fairly sure she could edge closer and closer to the center. Her eyelids dropped to half mast. The fire was a sullen, nasty glare, but it was an old human trick, and it kept things … safer.

  Or it could attract the attention of the things that preyed on boogaloo herds and the big shaggy grass-eaters out on the flat grasslands. You rarely saw the predators. Long sinuous catlike shapes prowled at night, their shoulders hip-high on a human and their teeth glowing ivory; there were long fat ribbonshapes with wedge-heads that the scuttles mimicked. Or maybe they were scuttles before they found metal armor, who knew? The small ones were venomous, the larger ones preferred to squeeze or take whole chunks out of their food. Then there were the other things, the ones you didn’t dare look at. If the wrongness of their shapes didn’t drive you howling-insane clawing your own eyes out, it might burst a vessel in your brain. Some of them had foxfire dangles on long whiplike tendrils, and those small lamps could hypnotize their next meal. Once, she’d seen them crawling over one of the grass-eaters at night, shadows and ripping sounds, those glowing dangles bobbing in time to the crunch of teeth splintering massive bones.

  Much, much safer to find a bubble that felt reasonably tranquil as the sun began to go down, light a fire, and stay put. Ashe had sometimes wondered aloud if it was the idea of the flames instead of the actual light and heat that kept a slim margin of safety around a campsite. Svin had simply shaken her head, not really caring as long as the effect was the same.

  The potzegs* stacked in a ring around the fire’s concrete home could be thrown, if it came to that. They had secrets, too, leathery interiors under a hard crust. Jervy had shown her how to crack them, way back on her second run with him. You could use a bandanna as a sling, and anything that liked to snack on the silver-furred almost-mammal boogaloos, or the grass-eaters, would retreat in a hurry from a cracked potzeg. You could even drive off a scuttle with them, if you didn’t have a maglock or a stimstick.

  The light-eyed sardie kept very still. Did he suspect she suspected? He was the only one who walked the right way in here—test each step, test again, look and think. Maybe he wasn’t a complete idiot; those who were almost cautious enough to be rifters were more dangerous than just plain lundies. She’d have to be careful.

  Ashe, Svinga asked the quiet inside her own head, the space she’d done all the solitary time in. Ashe, what do you think I should do?

  It was riddikulo-simple, really. Take them up the Alley, Ashe-not-Ashe, because Ashe was dead, replied.

  Svinga’s shorn head bobbed once, twice. She was technically on watch, as if it mattered. The thing that made her a rifter told her this place was safe for the night, and you learned when not to question. Just
like you learned when you should go limp and let a transit guard push you, and when you should turn on a sardie with every inch of fury you could scrape together.

  After a long while, Brood’s breathing shifted. He was truly asleep now.

  The rifter, utterly still, straight-backed and cross-legged by the fire, her eyes half open, slept as well. Smoke lifted, a curling serpentine ribbon, and collected near the ceiling. A soughing went overhead, not quite touching the structure’s roof, and the smoke turned to thin fine ash, falling with a slight staticky noise.

  None of them stirred, and the sighing vanished into the distance.

  29

  MESSAGE RECEIVED

  A chilly gray morning filled the Rift from one wall to the other. Just how high the Rift domes extended was a matter of debate, since anything closer than a satellite going overhead got either fried if it was lucky or sucked in if not. The satellites themselves only showed glowing, puckered areas on the Earth’s surface, every sensor array science could devise defeated by the slugwall. Each time someone wanted to point one of the fragile metal bugs in orbit at a Rift, a budget committee asked if it was really worth losing the bug and its instruments.

  The rifter stood for a long moment in the doorway, balanced on the threshold, and listened, closing her eyes. Her peach-fuzzed head didn’t glow today; the stubble growing in was almost-black and the gray light didn’t help. Barko hunched his shoulders, half listening too as Tremaine burbled excitedly about data the thergo had collected overnight.

  The spectra had been busy gathering, too. It was classic Rift signatures—high hard and fast for seven seconds, flattening out for three, spiking to max for two, then bubbling along at a high clip again for another random amount of time. When they stopped tonight, Tremaine and he would pop data into the collator Eschkov carried, and look for matches. One of the mysteries of the Rifts was the absolute noncorrelation between thergo and spectra readings. It was as if they willfully refused to match up properly.

  You could almost think the Rift had a mind of its own, and delighted in fuckering about with human insects crawling inside it.

  “How long is this going to take?” Mako, slurping another mouthful of boiled coffee, scratched the back of his neck at the same time. The man smelled like he lived on something fermented. Either that or it was his own sweat doing the fermenting.

  Morov glanced at the rifter, who was busy ignoring all of them. “Don’t know,” he said, finally.

  She didn’t even glance at him. Just sniffed, deeply, peering outside while she grabbed the right-hand side of the doorway as if to steady herself. A small, pale, capable little paw, her palms scabbed from yesterday. She hadn’t even stopped to disinfect the scrapes, and now it wouldn’t do any good to bandage them. Barko had a hazy memory of waking during the night, seeing her next to the fire, upright and dreamy-eyed, licking at the wounds. A little pink tongue behind her protruding teeth, dabbing at torn flesh. There was more color in her face now, and her dark eyes snapped open, alive and alert. “Ready in five,” she said, as if she expected them all to hustle.

  “I ain’t even brushed my teeth.” Senkin heaved a long-suffering sigh, digging in a small canvas toiletries bag. “Shiiiiit.”

  “All right, pack up and fuckbuckle down.” Morov’s knees popped as he levered himself up, jamming the usual half-smoked cigar into the corner of his mouth. “Mako, take care of the fire. Barko, get your eggheads together.”

  “Who nominated me?” Barko shot back, but not very loudly, as he heaved himself upright. That was the shitty thing about being a borderline responsible adult. You had to herd everyone else into doing their shitty-ass jobs.

  Eschkov, his wandering eye rolling wildly, smacked a fist into his other palm to emphasize a point. “—if we could just get some equipment up outside. Why the hell didn’t we bring a leav? We could have carried so much more.” His hair stood up in graying tufts, and he looked like a rumpled, very upset bird bobbing its head over a dirtpatch where the worms refused to show.

  “Yeah, if you wanted to end up like the last lot.” Barko got his backpack settled on his aching shoulders. “Come on, guys. She says we’re leaving.”

  That effectively canceled conversation. Tremaine didn’t bother arguing, just folded up his already-filthy handkerchief and stuffed it in the breast pocket of the lab coat he’d insisted on wearing under his woolen peacoat. Eschkov gave Barko a dirty look, or it might just have been that excitable eye of his. Rumor had it he’d been the one to sell some of the specs on the alloy skeletons that had once been Ashe the Rat and the two scientists who had almost survived the trip into QR-715.

  There had been a five-man sardie squad with them, too. Christ alone knew what had happened. Maybe they would run across some evidence?

  Barko couldn’t decide whether that was a comforting idea, or a terrifying one.

  Outside, a heavy green reek could have been promising rain. A pungent, burning metallic undertone coated the back of the throat and made the eyes sting; the rifter tied a faded, much-creased blue kerchief around the lower half of her face like a stickup warboy and the sardies hurried to do the same with their regulation nose-wipes. Eschkov had to make do with a thin cotton shirt, Barko hadn’t packed anything applicable, and Tremaine just shook his leonine head.

  The rifter, glancing at the sky every now and again, set off. This time, Mako and Senkin trailed her, the scientists were in the middle, and Morov trudged right after Tremaine, leaving Brood on rearguard again. Conversation sputtered along, Morov and Brood conferring in hushed tones, Eschkov muttering equations into a hand-record, and Mako occasionally snorting, hawking, and lifting his face-rag to send a wad of bacca-colored phlegm off to the side. Once, the rifter stopped just after he did that, turned around, and stared for a few moments, her now-bloodshot eyes narrowing.

  He stared back, and Barko could tell from the set of his shoulders that he was probably smiling. It wouldn’t be a friendly smile, either.

  The corners of the rifter’s eyes crinkled a bit, but she didn’t say a word. When she set off again, it was slightly faster, but with no less finicky care about the placement of her feet.

  Houses grew further apart, suburb turning back into quasi-rural. Huge saucerlike depressions began pocking the landscape, their inner surfaces scoured free of vegetation and threaded with parched cracks. Stamped flat with only faint shadows to show where structures had stood, the depressions clustered now in threes, now singly, and once the rifter led them counterclockwise around a group of five, their edges almost touching and starred with tough silvery sword-leaved weeds. The cracks inside the depressions were pressure-marks, and if he’d come across them outside the Rift he might have been fascinated, stopping to examine and conjecture.

  Barko restrained the urge to look back to see how the ground behind them had shifted. It would only give him a squirming feeling deep in his guts, so he hitched his backpack straps higher and tried not to feel like they were going in circles, tending vaguely westward if the sun was any indication.

  Apparently Morov felt the same way. “Bitch better know where she’s going,” he said once, softly, the words only floating to Barko’s ears because Eschkov’s coughing fit had just ended. Brood made a short noncommittal sound in reply.

  Noonish found them on a long grassy slope down to a copse of spiny-looking bushes, working parallel to the ridgetop. The grass itself had turned yellow and moved strangely against boots and trousers, tiny serrations catching at cloth and leather both. The rifter pointed at a particular spot, no different from the rest of the slope. “Wait there.”

  “For what?” Morov piped up from the back of the line, flicking a popper-fed lighter and inhaling sharply to get his cigar to catch.

  “Eat. Rest. I want to look around.” She barely turned her head, tracking the chilly-raw breeze moaning along sharp grass. In the distance, a rhythmic tearing sound became audible, but the ridge blocked their view of whatever it was. “Long way to go before dark.” The still, eerie light
turned her sallow, picked out the weave of her dungarees, and leached the grass of any comforting green.

  “Just where are we going?” Morov still didn’t move, though the others began trooping obediently for the patch she’d pointed at. Barko’s eyes, irritated by whatever fume was lifting from the ground or—there was an unwelcome thought—descending from the cloud cover, watered, and when his vision blurred it did look a little … different than the rest of the hillside. Not darker, not lighter, but more … there.

  More real. He couldn’t quantify it, and it hurt his head to try. Or maybe it was just the bitch headache from whatever was in the air.

  “Further in.” She half turned, keeping an eye on the top of the ridge. Was she considering going toward the source of that rustling, booming sound?

  “We’ve been going in loops, goddammit.” Morov chuffed a little at his cigar. Maybe the smoke cut the heavy, caustic vapor. The sky was a featureless bowl, but at least those oilslick things had disappeared. Now there were just broad-winged shapes you could imagine were birds, even though their heads looked too heavy and their flapping too lethargic to keep them afloat.

  That’s impossible, Barko wanted to say, because the landmarks keep changing.

  “You think anything in here ever goes in a straight line?” A short, contemptuous little laugh. “Don’t go down the hill. Wait right there.”

  With that, she took off for the crest with a long loping stride, amazingly fast for such a small woman.

  “Crooked as the human heart.” Tremaine eased his backpack straps off. “That’s what they say at home about the Rifts.”

  “Poetic.” Barko coughed, a deep dry sound. His throat was on fire, his eyes watering since morning and cutting salty tracks on his stubbled cheeks. “This shit stinks.”

  “Seems to be coming from those sinkholes back there.” Eschkov, damn him, still sounded excited. His spectacle lenses were smudged, but he didn’t seem to notice. His wandering eye rolled madly, and he seemed enchanted by the difficulty of mapping terrain that changed behind them instead of terrified at the notion. “You know, I wonder—”