by Alex Wells
Longbridge let out a bark of a laugh. “Sweep ’em up at night after they all get drunk on celebrating.”
Shige spread his hands. “I’m certainly not here to tell you how to do your job. But the day for this action is set–”
He was interrupted by a knock at the door. A guard in green poked his head in. “Sir?”
“Thought I said we weren’t to be disturbed,” Longbridge said.
“I know, sir. But we just had one of the rats break their line and come through.”
Longbridge’s eyebrows went up. “Break the line?”
The guard licked his lips, gaze flitting to Shige and Weld, uncertain. “Not exactly. I think… they let her through. And it’s not just any rat. It’s one of the agents. Said she needs to talk to the boss who came on the train.”
“Agents?” Shige asked Longbridge.
“Got a few reasonable rats who want to make a bit on the side. That’s how we knew this was coming.” He eyed Weld. “Not that we did anything to stop it. But thanks to her, we cleaned out a bunch of their supplies.”
“Ah. Well, please send her in,” Shige said. “It sounds as if she must have something important to tell us.”
Longbridge frowned. “Don’t know why she’d be breaking cover.”
“It’s probably really important, then,” Weld said. He seemed to be as nonplussed as Shige about the spy in the miner’s ranks. Shige wondered how much Longbridge had been doing under the table in this town. “Let’s see her.”
Longbridge jerked his head at the guard, who opened the door wider and let a woman in. She had a dark complexion, her brown hair shaved close to her head, as was common for the miners, making it easier to wear their helmets and get the worst of the mine dust out of their hair. But there was something off about the way she walked, a bit jerky and wooden, like she was being propelled forward or dragged by an unseen hand. One of her eyes showed a blood-red sclera, and the other was bloodshot. Dried blood crusted her nostrils. It all put Shige on edge, though he kept his expression bland. But his instincts told him, this is dangerous, be ready for anything.
Weld’s eyes widened. “Odalia Vigil was one of your spies?”
Longbridge ignored him, his attention fixed on the woman. “What in the hell is going on, Odalia?”
And she ignored everyone but Shige, her eyes on his blue suit. Though for a curious moment he felt like it wasn’t her looking out of her eyes at him, but someone else entirely. “You the boss from Newcastle?” Her voice trembled.
“Yes. What do you have to tell me?”
In a lightning fast movement, she lunged to the side and ripped Longbridge’s pistol from its holster. Immediately the weapon came up to point at Shige, the safety coming off in a click very audible in the stillness.
Shige raised his hands. “Stop,” he snapped, as Longbridge coiled to spring on her. She’d be able to fire before the man could get her down, and he really didn’t feel like being shot today. Longbridge froze, and Shige continued, “I’m listening. There’s no need to point that weapon at me.”
She recited without seeming to hear: “We ain’t your slaves. We ain’t your machines. We are miners. We are people. Ludlow belongs to us. Rouse belongs to us. Tercio belongs to us. Walsen belongs to us. Shimera belongs to us.” Her hand moved, and suddenly the barrel of the gun was pressed under her chin. A stray tear squeezed out of her blood-red eye. “No more traitors, no more spies, no more of your company lies.”
Longbridge lunged at her then, with the gun no longer pointed at Shige. Her finger squeezed the trigger, and the sharp retort of the gun preceded the wet thump of Longbridge slamming into her. Blood and bone and brain misted the air. Shige remained motionless for a moment, all sounds distant to his overwhelmed ears: Longbridge shouting with his face gone purple in fury, more guards flooding into the room, Weld vomiting into the trashcan by his desk.
Yes, he realized, this had just happened. The witch hunt had never made it to Ludlow, and he had little doubt that this was the work of someone contaminated by the planet. And he thought: This was really quite helpful of them. Longbridge is more than ready to kill. He cleared his throat. “Well, you know what Corporate wishes of you already. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m going to change my shirt.”
Shige ignored the look of uncomprehending anger from Longbridge, the gape-mouthed confusion from Weld, and coolly skirted the spreading puddle of blood as he left the office. As the breeze in the street touched his face, he finally noticed the wet of blood sprayed on his cheek. With one hand, he reached for his handkerchief. The other, compelled by some urge he could neither explain nor deny, came up to wipe the blood away.
Before he could truly comprehend his own movement, he licked the wet, red line off his finger. The earthy metallic taste sat on his tongue, and the immediate horror of it warred with a much calmer thought somehow in his mind: Disappointing.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
13 Days
Enough people had run out of water that Mag had decided they’d best set up a regular distribution in the church, Brother Rami gently but firmly counseling the few people who tried to sneak through the line twice. They’d also brought out some of the remaining food stores, what little there was. It might be time soon, Mag thought, to make another push for territory, and this time take the company store. That would solve a lot of their troubles.
“Hold back the stable milk for them has children,” Mag said, as she handed over the pathetically small box of white-filled bags to Omar. “Think the rest of us can handle drinkin’ our coffee black while that holds out.”
“Ain’t gonna be long till that, neither.” Omar huffed a laugh, though when she glanced at him, his gaze skittered away. She didn’t know how much he remembered about her walking through his brain, but she guessed it was more than nothing.
Mag pretended nothing was wrong at all. She couldn’t make someone be comfortable with her, and it wasn’t fair to ask Omar that, not after what she’d done to him. “Just means everyone’ll be plain meaner if the bosses try anythin’, right?”
“Right.” He tapped his fingers on the back of a pew. “You’re lookin’ tired, Mag.”
“I am tired.” She rubbed her eyes. “You think… Could you take over here?” It was another apology to Omar. A reminder he was trusted. But she never would have offered it if he had been a fuckup. Mag tried to spare the feelings of others, but she didn’t see the point in being stupid about it, and most everyone had figured that out by now.
His smile got a bit wider. “Sure thing. You go get you some rest.”
It wasn’t that she’d done so much today, at least nothing labor intensive. But she’d felt, as they’d started measuring out the precise amount of water a body needed to make it through the day, the minute Odalia blew her own head off. It had been exhausting, to hold Odalia endlessly with a corner of her attention, like clenching her hand tight around a marble for hours on end. And once Odalia was gone, she’d had a moment of blessed relief, and then another kind of fatigue had set in.
Mag was more than grateful to turn her feet toward Clarence’s house. She could only hope that if there was business talk to be had, he was doing it elsewhere so she could sleep. Maybe after getting Anabi to rub her neck first. She felt so tense she might snap.
The house was blessedly quiet as she opened the door. “Clarence?” No answer, but she hadn’t expected one. They’d been trying to work in shifts, so if she was overdue for sleeping, he’d be out and running from one end of the town to the other, checking on everyone, making sure their line against the greenbellies was still strong. “Anabi, if you’re there, I’m home.”
Her mouth was dry and tasted like electricity, so she headed for the kitchen first. Just a bare sip of water, and she could sleep.
Anabi sat ramrod-straight at the table, her hands clamped around a coffee mug. And a man sat across from her. Plain clothes, a face she didn’t recognize: broad nose, skin that wanted to be dark brown if it ever got a chance at the
sun, straight black hair in a neat cut. She looked down at his hands, resting lightly on the table in front of him: no callouses, no ingrained rock dust, no dirt under the perfect fingernails.
Mag went very still. She felt so tired, aching, the inside of her head raw. Too tired for fear, but also too tired for mad. She tried to summon up her strength anyway, like dragging herself up from a well, an inch at a time.
The man reached into his breast pocket and drew out a card, which he offered to her. “My identification,” he said. The way he pronounced that word, all clipped syllables, was pure offworlder.
Mag moved forward just enough to take the card and look at it. She had some vague notion that she’d seen the seals and symbols on it before, maybe on her school reader, maybe on the paperwork when she’d tried to get a ticket off world. The most important information was a name, Shigehiko Rollins, and the title, Agent of the Federal Union of Systems, Bureau of Citizens’ Rights Enforcement. She rolled those words over in her head a good long moment, thinking of all the things Hob had told her, before offering the card back. “So you’re Hob’s ‘reliable source’.” Her tone was flat. It wasn’t a question. What in the hell had Hob gotten herself mixed up in? What was a government man doing here? Even the simple revelation that the government existed as something other than paragraphs in a history lesson felt strange indeed.
The man, Shigehiko, took his card back and stowed it. “And you’re Magdala Kushtrim. It’s lovely to meet you at last.”
“Didn’t know I was so famous as to be worth meetin’.” There was sure a part of her that wanted to channel Hob and snarl, what the fuck do you want? But that had never been her way. Mag got herself a glass of water and sat down between Anabi and the government man. “What brings you here?”
“I don’t know how aware of my department you are…” he eyed her expression. “I see. The Bureau of Citizens’ Rights Enforcement is charged with seeing that situations like the current one never happen. We’re the ultimate advocate for ordinary citizens such as yourself and your fellow miners in the face of much more powerful organizations… like TransRift. The company has been trying very hard to keep us away from this world, and it’s obvious why, now that I’ve been here. But that situation will soon change, and I want to assure you that the BCRE will be very eager to hear the grievances of all the miners and other workers.”
“We been here a long time. Why y’all suddenly interested in our problems?”
Rollins grimaced. “As I said, TransRift has been trying very hard to keep us off this world…”
“You’re the government,” Mag pointed out. “You’re supposed to be in charge.” Something really wasn’t adding up here.
“TransRift is the only source of interstellar travel, Ms Kushtrim. They, as I think our mutual acquaintance might put it, have us by the balls.”
She had no doubt what mutual acquaintance he was talking about, and that did win a little smile from her. “And you’re lookin’ to change that.”
“I’m looking to discharge my duty, which is to make certain that all citizens enjoy the full rights to which they are entitled by Federal Union law. And I believe we do owe the workers of this world an apology for having kept you waiting so long.”
The words sounded good. Mag might have wanted to believe him, but she knew better. People in nice suits didn’t just help mine rats out of the goodness of their own hearts. There was more they wanted, and maybe the miners would see a side benefit, but she found that very hard to believe. And besides, this Shigehiko Rollins was only one man. “But that ain’t yet.”
“Soon, but not yet. I did want to let you know that there is an end in sight, and you ought to be ready for it.”
“How soon?”
“Approximately two weeks. A bit longer if TransRift really tries to fight off the inevitable, but I don’t think they’re that foolish.”
Two weeks was no time at all and a lifetime. Several lifetimes, maybe, cut short with bullets or thirst. “Sure we’ll be tryin’ to hold out that long or longer. But you got any help more solid than that?” Help was help, and she wasn’t going to turn that away on the principle of it. The temptation to lean on him with her witchiness was strong, but she was already so tired, she’d probably fumble it. She couldn’t afford to have this man running off, knowing what she was or thinking she’d tried to do something to him.
“A little information that you might find useful. TransRift has a new, extremely large mine that they only just spiked. They plan to be moving all of you to that new site, forcibly if necessary.”
Her mouth went dry. “How soon?”
“Within the next forty-eight hours.”
A new site. It had to be… “It’s the amritite, ain’t it. The source.” From all Hob and the Bone Collector had said, this was bad, far beyond all the miners’ blood about to be spilled.
He smiled. “I really couldn’t say.” But then he stuck his fingers in his breast pocket again, and this time extracted a folded flimsy. He offered that to her – just a set of numbers that her brain parsed into map coordinates. “If you’ve a way of getting this message to Hob Ravani, however, I’d be most grateful.”
Mag smiled tightly, and something in the expression made Anabi shift in her seat. “Reckon I could do that. With your compliments.”
“And my gratitude.” He stood and offered them both a strange little bow. “Have a lovely evening, ladies. Be careful.”
Mag and Anabi both stayed seated until the kitchen door had closed behind him. Then Mag dropped her face to her hands, rubbing at her eyes with rough fingers. “Shit,” she muttered. “Oh shit.”
A soft scrape, and Anabi’s slate came into her view, slid across the table by Anabi’s graceful brown fingers. He said he would help?
“Ever known anyone you could trust, said something like that?” Mag looked up.
Anabi shook her head. Then her lips quirked and she took the slate back to write: Other than Hob.
Mag barked a laugh. “Ain’t that the truth. And if there’s an opposite of Hob, I’m thinkin’ that man is it.” She rubbed her eyes again. “I’ve gotta… find a runner for that message. Even if I don’t trust any of this, Hob should see it and decide for herself. She knows him better’n me.”
I’ll do it.
Mag felt like her bones had melted with gratitude. She got a grease pencil and wrote out a quick note on the other side, to explain the situation to Hob. Then, after a moment’s thought, she got her own flimsy and copied the coordinates on there. She’d never had a head for memorizing numbers, but it seemed like it might be a good piece of information to know. That one, she tucked in her skirt pocket, and handed Shige’s to Anabi. “Thank you.”
Anabi leaned forward to kiss her lightly, just as good as you’re welcome. Better, even. Mag still tasted that little kiss when she collapsed into their bed to try to snatch a few hours of sleep, too tired to even draw the blackout curtains against the fierce afternoon sun.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
13 Days
“Another osprey sighted,” Maheegan’s laconic voice came, faint and crackling, through Hob’s helmet speaker. The helmet sat overturned on the sand between her and Freki as they sat in the shade on the lee side of a dune. “Lookit that. Finally got one comin’ back.”
“Bearing?” Hob asked.
There was a long pause, punctuated only by the whistle of the hot breeze blowing across the dunes. “Seven degrees off the ship rock.”
There weren’t official names on the map they had for most of the rocks and spires dotting the visible landscape, but before Maheegan had gone up his own spire to start watching from under the shade of a camo net, they’d agreed on some names. Geri nodded to himself and made a note of the location.
Hob checked her watch. “Fourteen hundred hours, thirty-two,” she told him. Another nod as he wrote that down.
Geri tapped his finger on the first line in his notes. “Been sixteen hours, thirteen minutes,” he said. “If it’s the firs
t one we saw goin’ out.”
“Can you tell, Maheegan?” Hob asked.
“I’d need a better scope.”
Hob frowned at the flimsy while Geri wrote down a few quick columns of numbers on the margin of it. “If that’s the same one an’ it’s been flyin’ that whole time and Bala gave me the right numbers, that’s atween 7,200 and and 5,600 kilometers. One way.” He twirled the grease pencil in his fingers. “But if it’s cargo and not recon, they’d have to unload. Dunno how long that would take.”
Hob grumbled under her breath. “That’s a long-ass ride.” While the motorcycles could be recharged just fine on the road, they could only really go sixty kilometers per hour on sand, up to one hundred and twenty if they had some good stretches of hardpan. And they couldn’t go all night safely; even if the batteries held up, the riders wouldn’t when they were talking about that kind of distance. “And a lot of supplies to carry for a round trip.”
“Damn long. We’re talkin’ at least five days straight,” Geri agreed.
Wherever the ospreys were going, it was one hell of a trip out into the wastes of the planet. The Wolves had always kept to the network of towns connected by rail lines, with even going to the far-off farming communities more travel than they were willing to do without a damn good profit already promised.
And just to make things a notch harder, if they were going to try to follow the ospreys, they couldn’t do a straight-line path under them. The motorcycles and riders would stand out in the desert like a line of bullets in a bag of sugar.
“You got enough numbers for now?” Hob asked Geri. They were supposed to be heading back today anyway for resupply.
He looked over his list and shrugged. “Gonna have to do more scoutin’ further out, but enough for here.”
She’d figured he was going to say that, but still didn’t like hearing it. They had the Bone Collector’s payout, so they could probably get the supplies together for heading further into the desert, but it would be one hell of an undertaking. Hob already didn’t like how far they’d come from their base, like there was some kind of invisible leash leading back home.