by Alex Wells
The pressure of Mag’s fingers increased until Hob felt her bones creak. “’Cause I’m Hob fuckin’ Ravani,” she said, her voice hoarse with that small pain that seemed so stupid beside everything else. “And I ain’t ever given up.”
Mag sat back down on her chair, her hands going limp. “’Cause you ain’t ever given up,” she repeated. And then to Hob’s distress and knee-shaking relief, she started to cry.
Chapter Forty-Two
9 Days
Heat rolled up from the saltpan in thick ribbons, a trick of the light making it look like the extinct lake still survived as a moat around Newcastle. Coyote tried to ignore the sweat rolling off his nose and stinging his eyes. It was still better than being cold, he reminded himself. Anything was better than being cold.
“They’re bringin’ another hydro-jack out,” Maheegan said slowly. His skin shone with sweat as well, his loose black curls plastered to his forehead. They were huddled under a camouflage net together, the air inside thick and still. “Crates. Big ’uns.”
“Can you see any labels on them?” Coyote asked, making another note on the flimsy spread out on the saltpan in front of him. It was a wonder it didn’t melt, really. They’d been at this since dawn, watching the loading as a flight of ospreys went out and another, empty from what Maheegan had seen, came in. TransRift was not messing about.
“Waitin’ to see if they’ll turn it.”
The list of what Maheegan had already been able to observe going on at the landing field through his scope was impressive. Heavy mining and earth moving equipment, enormous pallets of synthetic timbers for shoring up mine works, prefab housing of the most rickety sort. But that also wasn’t the information Coyote was after – he wasn’t certain what he was after, but he’d know it when he saw it.
“Caught the symbol. But… dunno what it is.”
“Let me see.” Coyote took possession of the scope, listening to Maheegan’s annoyingly laconic directions on where to find these crates in the massive sweep of the landing field. Normally used for landed rift ships, the full, busy operation didn’t even manage to cover a third of the area. He finally found the crates in question and frowned. It was a non-standard symbol, but he’d seen something like it before – at the wildcat camp where the Bone Collector had almost gotten the lot of them killed. Which had also been where that odd equipment perimeter had been set up.
“Any ideas?” Maheegan asked.
“A few, and I don’t like any of them.” Coyote handed the scope back and made another note.
“Next lot is… explosives.” Maheegan hmmed under his breath. “Don’t seem right, puttin’ those in an osprey.”
“They aren’t really any bumpier than a train, depending on the atmosphere.” And he was certain, if they were flying with this sort of intensity, the Weatherman was going to be involved to smooth their path. He also had a feeling, though he couldn’t quite explain the why of it, that the Weatherman wasn’t currently in Newcastle. His skin wasn’t crawling with the proximity, at the least.
“You think this is gonna tell us where they’re goin’?” Maheegan asked after another long stretch of silence.
Coyote wiped a swath of sweat from his brow and flicked it onto the saltpan. He was surprised there weren’t eagles circling over them yet. Newcastle probably had some sort of sonic deterrent that only the birds could hear, or they’d be getting no peace at all. “Of course not.”
Maheegan looked over at him, thick eyebrows raising. He didn’t look or sound upset, though. Maheegan wasn’t the sort to be overly fussed by anything. “Then why’re we here?”
“The Ravani wasn’t thinking rationally when she told us to work on mapping on our own. It’s a triangulation exercise. We could perhaps do it with two teams rather than three, but no lone Wolves.”
“No lone Wolves,” Maheegan agreed, and focused on the landing field again. “Think you illustrated that one all nice and neat.”
Coyote huffed. “Will I ever live that down?”
“Nope.”
“That’s very unfair.”
“That’s what you get for not dyin’ proper,” Maheegan remarked. “Oh, they’re fuelin’ one of the ospreys.”
“They have a fuel port on each wing.” Coyote took out his own pocket watch. “Tell me when they change between each port.” He watched the seconds tick by in silence, increasingly apprehensive. It was possible they only had low-flow refuelers here, but he doubted that. He’d never gone through pilot school himself, but he’d spent enough time on or around the heavy ospreys for other jobs over his checkered past.
“Finished with the second one,” Maheegan said, nearly thirty minutes later. Without looking up, he said, “You ain’t lookin’ happy.”
“How would you know?”
“Can hear it.”
Coyote sucked at his teeth, pensive. “They’ve fueled them fully. Presumably they don’t have a refuel depot on the way, since we haven’t seen them shipping any tankers out. But they also don’t put much in the way of extra fuel on those, to save the weight for cargo.”
“What kind of range, then?” Maheegan asked.
“Twenty thousand kilometers round trip, give or take,” Coyote said.
A pause for nothing but heat and sweat. “Damn,” Maheegan said. “That’s a long-ass ride.”
“I daresay longer than we can manage. But I’ve an idea.”
“You plannin’ on growin’ wings?”
“Don’t be silly. Let me have the scope again.” He raised it to his eye, looking through the wavering heat to that landing field. It was really damned impressive that Maheegan could see as much as he had. But then again, there was a reason he was their one and only sniper. Coyote looked over the landing field, re-counting the heavy ospreys, noting their configuration for loading, the spaces left for others. He noted, too, the guard towers at each corner of the landing field, the chain link fence with its thick coils of barbed wire at the top. Bless the high winds that tended to hit flat stretches of hardpan like this one, Coyote thought. It meant they couldn’t really build up decent, solid walls without a major investment the company wasn’t willing to make when it didn’t have to. Newcastle wasn’t as heavily fortified as any of the mining towns. Bandits didn’t come this far in, because they were either under TransRift’s sway already, or not stupid enough to try it.
“You gonna share that idea?” Maheegan asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
He felt rather than saw the man shrug. “I’m a curious fellow.”
“Well, what I’m thinking is that we simply need an osprey of our own.”
Maheegan guffawed in his own way, the sound almost silent but very emphatic. “Gonna steal us a pilot too, while you’re at it? And a Weatherman, so them invisible storms don’t just swat us out of the sky?”
“Haven’t you noticed? We’ve got someone much better than a Weatherman on our side.” Coyote swept the landing field again, noting one of the ospreys being towed over to a different area, toward the hangar. There’d be less security there, he thought, because only a fool would steal an osprey that wasn’t in perfect flight condition. He’d always been happy to be a fool, and in this case, a fool with an extremely good mechanic available, if Hati could just be dragged away from his damned novels.
“Mayhap. Don’t help with the pilot, though.”
“Recall how, in a previous life that we all politely don’t talk about, you were something that led you to being very good at shooting men in the head from over a mile distant?”
He sensed the sudden turn of caution in Maheegan, reluctance. This was always fraught territory. “Yeah?”
There were a million stories there, just screaming to be told, funny and terrible and no shit, there we were. But he’d taken this one bit of thieves’ honor seriously. All of them were born mewling from the desert with their Wolf name. They had no history they acknowledged beforehand, at least not publicly. In private, they remembered very well indeed. No man ever escape
d his past or the habits of a misspent lifetime. “Well, in that previous life we so politely don’t talk about, I know someone who was a pilot. Not me,” he added quickly.
Maheegan worked it through, then laughed again. “You know, you’re finally soundin’ like your old self.”
Coyote looked over at him, noting Maheegan’s shit-eating grin. “I wasn’t aware I’d stopped.”
“You been quiet, and morose, and downright spooky. For you.” Maheegan rolled onto his back, still careful not to disturb the camouflage net they shared, even as he laughed more. “But this’s gotta be the dumbest fuckin’ idea I heard in years.”
“Thank you. I think.”
Maheegan slapped his leg. “Ravani’s gonna love it.”
Chapter Forty-Three
9 Days
Mag stood on the wall of Ludlow. The hammer blows from the repairs still underway echoed up through her feet, and pounded in her head. Hob’s man Diablo – it was still hard to think of him that way, rather than Davey like he’d been a few months ago, hidden away in a train car with her – had thought she had a concussion and wanted to give her some pills and have her laying about. She’d said no, because she didn’t have time for that.
There was so much to do, hurt people to help, families to be checked on, a defense to be organized. The water situation had gone from worrying to desperate in just one night. She was the last of the nominal leaders, and she hadn’t ever meant to be that – it had been Odalia and Clarence making all the speeches and pushing the votes, and her just supporting them and giving them a kick when they went in the wrong direction. But now those two were a dead traitor and a dead hero, and people kept looking to Mag.
She needed that. She needed something to do to keep her hands from clenching into fists until her fingers broke. She needed work so that she wouldn’t think about Anabi, abducted and afraid and in the power of people who would do god only knew what to her. So she wouldn’t think about Clarence, stiff and cold and pale, laid out in the church and waiting for his turn to be burned on the hill by the mine.
Brother Rami had chased her out of the church and told her to lay down, and Omar had shooed her from the company store and told her to go lay down, and she wasn’t fucking ready to lay down, because she might not ever have the will to get back up.
Dust bloomed on the horizon, an orange-red cloud. Mag felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. It was too soon for another raid, wasn’t it? She’d sent Hob and her people out before dawn to go check on the other towns. Could it be them coming back? She opened her mouth to shout an alarm, but someone else beat her to it – good thing, she seemed to be taking ten times too long to work any thoughts through her brain.
Pounding feet echoed through the wall as miners piled alongside her, clutching a motley assortment of guns stolen from Mariposa and mining equipment, even lengths of chain. And blessedly, a pair of binoculars, lenses frosted with sand scratch. Mag elbowed her way over to the woman holding them. “Mind if I borrow those?”
The woman, tiny and spare with a face like a hatchet, seemed liable to argue until she looked at Mag. Then she handed the binoculars over without so much as a word.
The closer view didn’t help that much, since all she saw at first were billows of dust, indistinct shadows moving in them. Then she picked out the bulky shape of… “Trucks,” she yelled. “We got more trucks comin’ in.” A murmur swept through the miners, the strange creaks and squeaks of hands tightening on weapons.
Someone tugged at her elbow – the woman whose binoculars she’d taken. Mag ignored her, still peering into the dust cloud. She began to make out new shapes, smaller ones, darting back and forth between the bulk of the trucks: motorcycles. A motley enough assortment that they couldn’t be spit-shined security vehicles.
Relief made her sag. She lowered the binoculars, not really strong enough to hold them up any more, and felt them be snatched away. “It’s the Wolves. It’s them. It’s all right.” This time, at least. A ragged cheer went up around the wall, and people moved back off to what they’d been doing. Mag stayed where she was at, watching and waiting until she saw the unmistakable, lanky silhouette of Hob, at ease on her motorcycle.
The trucks were full of people, many of them bruised and bloodied. Miners from Walsen, and the children that they’d hidden away when the raid started. “We’re all that’s left,” their only work gang leader told Mag. She was a big woman, white skin now gone red from being in the sun, her shoulders broad and arms heavy with muscle. Dried blood covered half her face, run from a clotted cut on her forehead. “Lot of dead. Rest got taken in the trucks. We’re the ones managed to breach the wall on the opposite side and run for it.”
Mag looked at the little crowd, a bit shy of one hundred people, and tried not to choke on her despair. More mouths to feed and fill with water, and they’d brought nothing with them. Well, she’d always said over and over that the miners had to stick together. She wasn’t going to change her tune now. “Hurt ones, go to the churchyard and see Brother Rami and Diablo.” She had to swallow a hiccupping giggle of hysteria as that combination of names struck her. She felt almost relieved when someone in the exhausted crowd did bark out an unsteady guffaw. “Rest of you, a place to stay gets assigned at the company store. Food and water’s strict rations.” She pointed them in the right directions. Hob stood by, arms crossed over leathers fuzzed with rust-colored dust, and waited.
“You got more news?” Mag asked her, when the last of the people from Walsen had gone on their way.
“Mayhap. On the way around Walsen, Conall and Lykaios were dead sure we were bein’ watched. Probably spies in camouflage blinds. No one tried to stop us.”
It didn’t take a whole lot of thinking for Mag to know what she was getting at. “They want us to gather everyone here. Run us through our supplies faster.”
“Good news is, one of the trucks is about half full with shit we salvaged from Walsen,” Hob said.
“I’ll let Omar know.”
“Bad news is, it ain’t that much. And ain’t no water.” Hob had been running her small outfit for years, always on the ragged edge of starvation. She had a keen eye for supplies.
“Maybe we can hold out till the government man shows up,” Mag said, though even to her own ears, her tone sounded bleak. “And get Brother Rami prayin’ that the new boss ain’t gonna be the same as the old boss.”
“We both know what prayin’ gets you.” Hob sighed and ran her hand over her hair, sweat-soaked and plastered dark to her scalp. “Our crew that checked on Rouse met up with us too. Rouse held. Ain’t as well organized as what you got here, but they’re gettin’ their shit together. They got survivors comin’ in from Shimera.”
Mag opened her mouth to ask about Tercio, the closest of them to Newcastle, but another round of shouting from the wall stopped the words in her throat. She didn’t have it in her to run, so she walked a good clip, Hob at her shoulder like she thought Mag might fall over.
This new dust cloud was on the south, almost hidden by the black rocks of the mine. Mag found the woman with the binoculars and again took them off her, ignoring the dirty look she got for her trouble. “Think that’s more trucks,” she said, after a moment of trying to stare through the dust.
“An’ more,” Hob agreed. She had the scope off a gun held up to her one eye. “Those other things? Tractors.”
Mag didn’t fight the woman who snatched her binoculars back. “Tractors?”
“Don’t ask me,” Hob said. “But we know they ain’t Mariposa.”
This new group, twenty-two people by Mag’s count, was from the town of Blessid. She recognized Tavris Meeks, the small brown man she’d once tried to ask for help, as he slid off the seat of one of the tractors. Bullet holes marred its fenders. Mag met him outside the town gates.
“We’re lookin’ for help,” he said, not meeting Mag’s eyes. “Heard y’all might have shelter.”
“The hell happened to you?” Hob growled behind Mag. And bless her f
or it, because Mag didn’t think she’d be able to say a damn word without screaming.
“Company man come,” Tavris said, finally looking up. “Said they needed people for a special project. Minin’ and buildin’ a new rail line for the mine. Offered us a bonus, and a few went, but most of us don’t want that. So we told ’em we ain’t miners, and we got crops to tend and sent him packin’. Guess they didn’t like that answer. Come back with trucks and guns and… we’re the ones who escaped.”
Mag let out her breath carefully and somehow her voice was even as she spoke. “I remember, when I came to you for help, an’ you said our problems weren’t yours.”
“Company men come and told us again and again that we keep our noses clean and not help the troublemakers. That we was different, and they give us a bonus for keeping to ourselves.” Tavris looked down at the ground, his shoulders taut as wire. “Guess we ain’t so different after all.”
She wanted to punch him. She wanted to shove him. And she definitely wanted to tell him to get the hell out of her town. And then, she thought, what good would she be? She made herself take another careful breath. “You brung any food or water with you?”
“Got some guns,” Tavris said. “But they took everythin’ else. Like they was expectin’ it. And burned the silos.” That last, he delivered in a tone of mixed anger and horror.
She felt Hob behind her, ready to jump whichever way Mag did. And suddenly, she felt too damned tired to jump. “Any of you hurt, go to the churchyard and find Brother Rami. Rest of you, go to the company store. Ask someone to show you the way. They’ll find you somethin’ to eat and a place to sleep.”
Tavris swallowed hard and relaxed, like he’d been all tense for a blow that never came. “Thank you. We were wrong. I pray to God we get another chance to do it right.”