by Alex Wells
“Do you think someone grabbed it?” Mag asked Anabi, who if anything looked more distraught than her.
No one said anything to me, Anabi wrote on her slate. And since she’d taken over bookkeeping, no one was supposed to touch the caches without letting her know.
Mag took a deep breath, trying to wrestle down the paranoia that jangled at her nerves. Maybe Clarence had things moved. A hell of a lot of their water had been hidden in this warehouse, and water was more precious than anything, even bullets. “Gotta be an explanation,” she said. She could go check one of the caches outside the walls, but that should be a last resort. Instead, she led Anabi back across town, cutting over fences and through narrow alleys between houses until they reached the church.
Mag hadn’t wanted to trust the preacher in Ludlow at first, remembering all too well what the preacher in Rouse had done, according to Hob. Most of the preachers in the towns were in the pay of the company in some way. Brother Rami was a different sort – the part where he insisted everyone call him “Brother” instead of anything else was a start – and he’d gotten in deep with the miners and their meetings quick. And since he kept the church and preached the company sermons with a wink and a nod, the company mostly let him alone.
He opened the back door of the church after a minute of quiet, frantic knocking. Brother Rami was shorter than Mag, and wore a plain brown bathrobe, his hair in long locks pulled back from his face with a piece of twine. His wide-set brown eyes were round in his dark face when he took in Mag and Anabi. “Is somethin’ wrong?” He craned his neck out, trying to look behind them. His voice was high for a man’s, husky.
“I don’t know. Maybe. You been out of your church much, last twenty-four hours?”
Brother Rami frowned, even as he waved the two of them inside. “I was out yesterday. Wanted to be able to grab anyone got hurt, if it came to that. And I was out again in the night. Tilly Grant got her ass beat proper because they caught her tryin’ to sneak to the pit boss’s house.” He clicked his tongue. “Can’t say I approve as a man of God, but also can’t say I approve of her bein’ that damn dumb.”
Mag nodded. “Can you show me the cache?”
His frown got even more dire. “Expectin’ trouble?”
“Might already be there.”
He waved them along to the back room where extra books and candles and the like were stored. He moved a pile of boxes and knocked the false back off a cabinet. Mag peered inside and breathed a sigh of relief that she caught the glint of metal. “OK. But…” the space seemed small. “That all of ’em?”
He shook his head. “Had to split it up. You want to see the other parts?”
Mag nodded, and followed. He showed her another hidden cache in his kitchen, and then stopped at one of the pews, looking thunderous. “Didn’t notice this before since we ain’t had a service in the last day…”
“Notice what?”
He pointed to the floor; there were pale streaks like scars in the worn wood, blackened with years of tracked-in mine dust. “Someone scratched up my floor.” He pushed the pew aside and pressed on the board until it came under his hand, then pulled it away. Beneath was empty. “What in God’s name…” he breathed.
Mag felt like her entire body went cold. “Anyone know where that was, but not the others?”
“No one but me knew about the others. Boy who brought me the last load helped me stow it there, though. Omar… yes. Him. Do you think…?”
It was bad, to be so angry and yet so calm. Because of course, who else knew about the other caches? Just her, Omar, Odalia, and Clarence. And who was the latecomer to that, the eager helper? She’d been stupid to talk herself out of her distrust, and it wasn’t going to hurt just her. “Thanks for your time, Brother.”
Brother Rami observed her silently for a moment, then said, “Remember that murder is still a mortal sin.”
Anabi clutched Mag’s hand even tighter. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Mag had Anabi take a message to Omar, asking him to meet her back at that first warehouse. She was too angry to be able to face him herself and keep up a facade. She waited, arms crossed. The small rear door of the warehouse opened after only ten minutes; he must have hurried.
Omar glanced around, looking surprised that she was alone. “Mag, what–”
“Stop.” She didn’t want to hear another damn thing out of his mouth. She put every bit of power she had into that word, crashing over him like a wave. She felt him crumble. His mouth gaped, his eyes going all unfocused. It would have almost been funny if she weren’t ready to choke him with her bare hands. “We’re gonna have us a talk, Omar. You’re gonna tell me everythin’ I want to know.”
“Be happy to,” he mumbled, staring through her. A thin ribbon of blood began to trickle from one corner of his eye. She found she didn’t care.
“What did you tell the company men?” she asked.
Of all things, he still managed to look confused. “I didn’t tell them nothin’.”
Leaned as she was into that strange space that was his thoughts, she could smell that he wasn’t lying. Or thought he wasn’t lying. “Who did you tell about the caches?”
“You, Clarence, Odalia. Brother Rami, just for the one.”
This couldn’t be right. Couldn’t be. She felt doubt suck at her will, and tamped it back as best she could. She had stepped into this with both feet. No choice but to see it through. “Who did you tell about meeting Coyote?”
“Didn’t tell no one.” Had it been bad luck after all? She began to feel sick, and felt her grip on him slip a little. Omar swayed back a step, his expression like a man in a dream. “I feel real shook about it. Didn’t want no harm to come to him. Not after Odalia said he’d been havin’ a tough time and needed some friends.”
Mag froze. “Odalia said what?” He repeated himself, which wasn’t useful. What could that even mean? “Tell me all of it,” she ordered, pressing in on him with her mind so he’d understand what she actually wanted.
“Told me to talk to him. Told me where me an’ my friends could meet up with him. Just for drinkin’ and cards and she said he liked his men funny and I was funny,” Omar said, slowly. “And she knows I been powerful lonely since I transferred here.”
Mag took a deep breath and let it out slowly. If Odalia had set all of that up… it was a thought too horrible to contemplate, after how deep in she’d been with everything. “Has Odalia told you other things?”
“She’s been real helpful,” Omar said. “Checked over messages for me, ’cause my readin’ ain’t so good. Checked behind me to make sure everythin’ was hidden proper when you gave me supplies to take care of. Oh, an’ when I was gonna put all those credits away, she said she’d do it, so they’d be safe.” He continued on, more details, a hundred little things that on their face were innocent, helpful, all for the cause. But it meant there wasn’t anything Odalia didn’t know. And she’d done it without ever breathing a word to Clarence and Mag, through someone who just thought he was being helpful.
And she’d done her level best to always make Mag question herself, to make her seem unreliable and dangerous. Mag knew that too.
Feeling sick to her stomach, Mag took out her handkerchief and wiped away the blood seeping down Omar’s cheek. Carefully, she let his mind go. He blinked like a man waking from a dream. “Mag?”
“Shh,” she said. “You done a good thing today. You go on home, and have a good sleep, and be ready. Things’re gonna happen sooner rather than later.” The words were a gentle push compared to everything else, and he accepted that just as readily.
She waited for him to leave, then carefully folded the handkerchief so it was blood-side in. She still felt his mind, so close, his words and confusion echoing in her own skull. She did her best to shake the sensation away and focus on what he’d told her rather than how it had felt, the reality of betrayal.
It let her find her anger again, and she needed that like the air that filled her lungs a
s she made her way back to Clarence’s house. Anabi waited for her, but silently stepped aside. Clarence sat at the kitchen table, cup of coffee in one hand, eyes still red with sleep.
The tiredness in his face seemed to both fall away and grow infinitely worse as he took in Mag’s expression. “Mag.”
She pulled up a chair and sat. “I got a thing or two to tell you that you ain’t gonna like. About Odalia.”
He put his cup down so slowly, so carefully that the surface of the coffee didn’t even ripple as it touched the table.
Chapter Thirty-Three
19 Days
Once more, Shige found himself in the surprisingly plush cabin of the helicopter, desert rolling out beneath them. Only this time, the helicopter was one of a much larger convoy, complete with two heavy Mariposa gunships. Shige still wasn’t certain why the security chief had ordered their presence; what had happened to Mr Yellow before wasn’t something that could be shot from the air. But it meant that the expedition was happening, so he wasn’t about to complain. The assurances, if cautious ones, from Dr Kiyoder that Mr Yellow was unlikely to experience a similar shutdown again had probably helped. But Shige thought what had truly tipped the balance was when Mr Yellow turned to Ms Meetchim, addressing her directly through the one-way glass of his room as she observed him. He’d said, “Let us go to the heart. We will eat it.”
No one had quite known what Mr Yellow meant by the “heart”, but considering the push for a more producible source of amritite, Ms Meetchim had been easy to convince afterward that it was worth exploring.
The Weatherman sat stock still in his seat now, when he’d never been so quiet during any kind of transit before. His head tilted like he was listening for a far-off noise that he could barely hear. One of the Weatherman’s thin hands rested lightly on a pressure control that he could turn this way and that, which communicated the direction he wanted to the pilot. It was easier than trying to get him to finetune direction verbally; they’d mercifully figured that out before the convoy had taken off, when he’d physically acted out the direction he wanted them to go rather than being able to answer the question coherently.
They flew for hours, the orange-pink undulating desert below giving way to stretches of hardpan, and even a very rare field of spiky, gray-green native plants. Shige noted the coordinates of that sighting down, since they were always looking for sources of water that didn’t involve expensive imports from other planets.
Then they were over a vast, light pink stretch of saltpan that extended out into the horizon. Shige had seen the aerial surveys of Tanegawa’s World, pictures of sadly low resolution since the surveys had to be completed from beyond the worst interference of the planet’s magnetic field. There’d been wide basins, the skeletal remains of long-extinct oceans, though no one seemed to know where all that water could have logically gone, just as the source of the moisture for the intense and shockingly short rainy season made no sense to any planetary climate model yet to be devised. The endless flat beneath them was one of those extinct oceans, he was sure of that before he even checked his map.
He would have lost all sense of time from the sameness of the flat that stretched beneath them if he hadn’t had a watch to check. The time elapsed told him they had to be at least four thousand kilometers into the ocean basin when Mr Yellow sat bolt upright and said: “Here.” He pounded on the pressure plate with one hand.
The pilot had no difficulty finding a place to land, homing in on the exact spot Mr Yellow wanted. A salt flat like this was nearly as good as an engineered landing pad for lighter vehicles.
Shige slipped on a pair of dark glasses as the outer door opened again. The day was nearly blinding even with that consideration, the light and heat reflecting up ruthlessly from the pale crust of the salt flat. There was nothing remarkable about where they’d landed.
Mr Yellow, hands covering his eyes, walked out onto the flat. There wasn’t anything for him to trip over out here, so Shige let him move as he wished, though he stayed close by. Three security guards and the copilot followed a little behind, while the gunships hovered overhead, their rotors shockingly loud in the stillness.
About a hundred meters from the helicopter, Mr Yellow came to a sudden stop. He crouched down and rested his hands on the burning hot surface of the salt, his eyes squeezed shut. “We hear.”
Shige made careful note of their distance and bearing from the helicopter, which would have a much better estimation of location thanks to recorded velocity, bearing, and time information. He also had thought to bring a can of paint with him, which would probably be more useful. There wasn’t sand to cover a mark quickly out here.
“I don’t see anything,” the copilot said, stopping next to Shige. “Or hear anything.”
“We’re looking for a mineral source, so it might be quite deep below the surface,” Shige offered.
Mr Yellow’s face contorted into a grimace. A thin whine escaped from the Weatherman’s lips as he clenched his hands against the ground. Shige saw his shoulders tense and strain, as if he tried to lift up the land itself.
“What’s wrong with him?” one of the security guards asked.
A thin rivulet of crimson ran from Mr Yellow’s nose, drops falling bright onto the salt surface. Shige was half-surprised that they didn’t sizzle on contact, though they already seemed to have dried when he crouched in front of the Weatherman. But he didn’t feel alarmed, somehow, like he could hear Mr Yellow calling into the ground, searching for an answer – though obviously to no avail. But this was it, this had to be it, the place Mr Yellow needed. “Mr Yellow, stop. Please. Before you hurt yourself.” When there was no response, he cautiously touched the Weatherman’s arm.
“Too deep,” Mr Yellow moaned. “We cannot reach it.”
“That’s all right.” Shige took a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully wiped the blood away from Mr Yellow’s nose. It would take some time, of course, since they’d either have to build tracks out here, or a landing pad suitable for a suborbital transport; he knew they had a few of those waiting around for use. But now that there was a location to be explored, he had little doubt that Meetchim would move fast. Good, he thought, then disagreed with himself: bad. TransRift couldn’t be too entrenched when the inspector arrived… but no, he rationalized, wouldn’t it be better to have this as a distraction for Meetchim for the last few weeks before the inspector arrived? Wouldn’t it be better to have this mystery mostly uncovered – Mr Yellow’s thirst satisfied – and waiting for capture by the FUS? “That’s what miners are for.”
18 Days
“I trust this latest outing was more of a success than the previous one?” Ms Meetchim asked, her voice dangerously cool.
Shige clasped his hands loosely in front of himself, head slightly bowed. The security curtains of Ms Meetchim’s office were drawn again, leaving her a lone figure in dark blue, seated at a glass-and-metal desk, against a black background. It made her pale face and blonde hair seem to float, disembodied.
“Very much so, Ms Meetchim. Mr Yellow is in fine shape and more eager than ever to continue to work. He led us out to a point he claimed was the source of the amritite.” Not quite what Mr Yellow had said, but a useful interpretation.
“Show me the map.”
He grabbed the cylindrical case he’d set next to his foot and shook out the map he’d had made just an hour ago. It was a beautiful rendition of the area from Newcastle to the point Mr Yellow had found, with the flight path of the helicopter in much higher resolution thanks to them having taken pictures as they flew. He tapped the red triangle that sat on the flat expanse of the salt plain, nearly due north. “This is the precise point.”
“Far away, isn’t it?”
“Further than I’d like. And Mr Yellow indicated that the source was deep underground.”
She grimaced, measuring the distance between Newcastle and the point with her fingers. “I didn’t particularly like having Mr Yellow off site, but I think we’re going to
have to utilize him in that capacity for the time being. Make a memo to let management and labs know that we’ll need to shut down all non-essential systems, since Mr Yellow won’t be able to monitor as closely as we’d like. Speak with Dr Kiyoder and find out if he’ll have to be with every convoy, or if he can be stationed in such a way that we can have a free flow of supplies.”
He took dutiful notes. “Will you want a rail line constructed to the site?”
“Yes. Built from both ends, though it will take quite some time.” She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Until then we can mobilize the old fleet of cargo ospreys. We’ll need the labs to switch over to full-time fuel conversion for them, I think. They were never retrofitted.”
“The supplies will be simple to organize. Do you have a preference in regards to where the personnel should come from?”
Ms Meetchim looked at him for a long moment, then laughed sharply. He fought down a shock of alarm, wondering what he’d missed. “I suppose you have been busy over the last several days,” she remarked. “All but two of the mining towns have made good on their tantrum threat. Convenient for all of the troublemakers to have sorted themselves out. We needn’t play nice anymore.”
“And so… put the non-striking towns and the farmers on the rail line, and–”
“–the rest down in the pit, yes,” Ms Meetchim said. “They can go down there willingly or at the end of a rifle, I don’t care. I’ll put in a second request for personnel when the next ship comes in. I think… yes, the last round of news you brought indicated there was civil unrest on Tai-Yen. I’ll ask for a recruitment drive there to sweep up as many refugees as we can get. They ought to be appropriately grateful for a new home and meaningful work.”
Shige nodded as if her suggestion was brilliant rather than horrifying. “Shall I head out to the towns once I’ve completed the transfers ready for the wildcat sites and the supply schedules for the ospreys?” This might be his last chance to get information in some way to his contacts there. If nothing else, it would add another useful element of chaos to make certain Hob Ravani knew where all the resources would be going. And it would be an opportunity to nudge the conflict in a useful direction, since the miners had all seemed rather timid for their breed until now, surprisingly self-controlled for people who had grown up with so little education.